Apple Watch App

I’d love to check my balance on my Samsung Gear watch too!

Start a thread about it then :wink:

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No point, it will just get trashed by Apple fans objecting to Monzo supporting a second Android payment system.

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Honestly, I feel a generic “Monzo for Wearables” thread might be more appropriate than specifically “Apple Watch”.

I got an Apple Watch at the weekend and enjoyed the Natwest app on it for the final 2 days of having an account with them. Would appreciate something similar with Monzo, although presumably without the “Get Cash” feature :laughing:

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Personally I don’t have anything against Android payment systems, but I do hate every single manufacturer’s own shitty payment system - FitBit Pay, Garmin Pay, Samsung Pay, etc… if the thing runs Android (or Wear OS), they should just use Google Pay (new name for Android Pay) and be done with it. Supporting those knockoff payment systems makes them more relevant and makes things worse for everyone else because instead of 2 competing systems we now have 10.

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Theoretically, WearOS devices should mirror Google Pay cards, but device manufacturers and/or OS fragmentation may affect that, so your mileage may vary. Either way, I believe there are Monzo users who can pay with Android-powered watches already, albeit without a dedicated Monzo app.

Once Monzo have Apple Pay, it’ll work on the watch by default too I believe.

I don’t believe there’s any fragmentation on WearOS.

Google control it to a much tighter degree than they do Android releases, and they push the updates directly. The only OEM customisation allowed is custom watch faces. So unless a device is EOL, everything should be on the same OS version.

I think this is the confusion. None of the above (well, neither FitBit nor Samsung Gear - I haven’t looked into Garmin) run on Android / Wear OS. Gear runs on Tizen (Samsung’s Android wanna-be / escape hatch / leverage with Google), and FitBit run FitBit OS - a proprietary system.

That said, if we could just all have some lovely open standards and make everything interoperable, I’d be extremely happy.

(Not trolling: I’d quite like FitBit pay. I opened a Starling account for it!)

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So is this something you can do?

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At the moment I’d need to become an AISP which doesn’t make sense from a business perspective; so I need to somehow get access to the Monzo API without being an AISP.

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Yeah this is a pain. I mean, I understand why the regulations are as they are, but they do rule out lots of innovation (alternative ‘power apps’ for Monzo, for example; open source rules engines / apps that could do super-cool but niche things with IFTTT-like functionality… and lots of things no one’s thought of yet…)

Edit: something a bit like this:

Edit again: I don’t mean to necessarily use the IFTTT product - something similar that users could use to construct simple rules like “when I get paid >£1000, transfer X% to savings account 10-10-10, 12344567”. I do like the way that common rules are packaged up for reuse here, though.

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Yeah that’s my biggest disappointment with the so-called “open” banking. I understand regulations but GDPR should already cover that (and I am in fact already compliant with it). An extra layer of regulations just because we’re talking about how much did you spend on pizza last night seems unnecessary considering other data is much more sensitive (like your email or Facebook data) and we seem to be doing fine without it (again GDPR already covers that).

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OK fair enough :+1::+1::+1:

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I think regulation for data - and its various levels of sensitivity - as opposed to industry-specific thinking might be the big thing in a few years time. (Or it might be an opportunity missed. Who can tell?)

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How easy is it to create the watch app myself :upside_down_face:

It took me about an afternoon to do the UI (replicating the Monzo app’s home view), and another one to connect it to the API.

The tricky part (which I didn’t do yet) is merging both prepaid & current accounts in a single view - the API actually gives you both accounts separately, and it’s up to the client to merge them.

There’s also a need for caching (using Core Data) as the API takes a few seconds to reply, so you can’t just be waiting for that to populate the UI - you need to fetch from cache to display your transactions list immediately and refresh the cache in the background without blocking the UI.

In total I’d say it would take a couple of days for an experienced developer.

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cheers :+1: an experienced developer I am not so I’ll probably leave it

Might have a dabble over a weekend, doesn’t sound too bad!

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Is this something that can be shared :roll_eyes:

I’ll see when I’m done. Away in SA for work for a few weeks but will dabble when I get back

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