When you open the Monzo app (at least on Android), it takes a while to show the current balance. I presume this is while the app fetches this information from the internet. If you’re offline, the balance doesn’t appear at all.
This can be annoying when you’re in a shop with no connectivity and you want to know if you have enough money on the card to make the purchase.
Would it be a good idea to instantly display a cached offline balance in a grey colour, before it gets updated to the correct value?
Chances are these two values would be the same, and it would improve usability especially in the beta stages, where people choose to keep small sums of money on their Monzo accounts.
I’ve wanted this a few times but I think it’s really important to show that it’s old data.
It’s worse having incorrect information than none sometimes.
The iOS app does this to some degree, updating the balance in the background in response to notifications. The widget getting activated regularly helps too.
Possibly out of date balances would indeed need to be marked as such somehow, either by dimming the value significantly or with an icon.
I agree, it has to be really clear that the information is outdated. Then again, this is already being done with the transaction feed…
When you open the app, it’s pretty clear that the app is updating the entries, as the refresh-y arrow thingy is spinning away. Maybe, when the app detects you are completely disconnected from a network, it could display a banner (similar to FB Messenger’s red strip) warning you about outdated information.
