Feels like the iOS / Android disparity is growing not shrinking

I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Targets need some significant updates on iOS to be useful for many people. Credits and split bills aren’t dealt with, amongst other things. There are threads about this, and plans for an overhaul, but no progress because of the current account focus. So you’re not missing much on Android. Once the overhaul happens, I’m confident it will be for both platforms, and create something useable for us all. There certainly wouldn’t be any point implementing the current basic version on Android, I wouldn’t think.

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Yep totally agree. I’ve recently moved from iPhone to Google Pixel 2 (as are a lot of people) and I’m really disappointed with the Android app in comparison. I’ve been reading about Android updates coming soon for 3 months now. The Pulse Map was meant to be ready by Xmas and now it could be another 6 months to a year before we have it on Android.

Very frustrating and this frustration will only increase because there are a huge amount of people moving to Google and Samsung phones now that Apple has started to fall behind tech-wise yet has increased its prices.

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If you remove yourself from the programming/OS technicalities of this discussion, essentially it boils down to a certain group of users not being afforded financial tools to manage their money.

It’s like having a twin sibling that your parents favour. Jealousy is a strong emotion.

Giving Android users new features ahead of iOS users isn’t going to solve the problem either?

I personally don’t think I can take Monzo seriously as a Bank until they offer the same financial tools and services to all of their customers, irrespective of the colour of the eyes, size of their feet, colour of their favourite t-shirt or operating system of their phones?

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You are right, except Monzo, despite how nice they are, is a business and is there to make money first and foremost, and not some altruistic non-profit giving everyone “financial tools to manage their money”. :wink:

Even ignoring the development side of it, as a mobile app developer you’ll just make way more money from iOS users than Android - as a business it makes perfect sense to target the market that’ll bring you the most revenue and publicity.

So honestly, I don’t think Monzo should worry about a few disgruntled users on another platform at the moment - despite all those issues their product is still successful so from a business point of view I see no point in changing anything.

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I hope that “perfect sense” isn’t at the cost of losing the other half of their user base.

Is it actually the other half though? Only :monzo: knows (and they may not want to disclose such stats) but I have a doubt - if it was actually 50% of users I don’t think they would neglect the app so much. I would expect the number to be more like 10 - 20% and so leaving the app behind is a calculated risk and loss they hope to recoup on the profits brought in by assigning the dev resources to iOS instead.

After not being able to set targets and manage my finances in that regard, I rarely use Monzo for managing finances. Yolt has come to the party now for Android users and offers a great deal more in terms of management. It really is a pitty as I feel Monzo has such potential

You might want to take a look at Starling - I’ve heard their Android app is better… but then their card is unreliable, so I’m not sure which one is better.

To be honest I wish the APIs were more open. I can find 10x third-party Twitter clients on both platforms right now - why should it be any different for Monzo? If the API was open you’d already see third-party clients with better features than the original.

PSD2 is actually a huge joke in that regard, as the costs to become an “FCA approved” service provider are prohibitive for anyone but the biggest players, which definitely excludes solo developers making clients as side projects and will allow the big players (like Emma or Yolt) to stop innovating and stagnate once they reach mass adoption and rely on that barrier of entry to keep future competition away.

I just want to nip this in bud here and say this is definitely, 100% not the case.
Furthermore, for us, the chosen platform of the user makes zero difference to revenues. Right now, we have negative unit economics meaning we lose money per user - doesn’t matter what platform. Our path to profitability will come from features and partnerships that have nothing to do with what operating the system the user is on.

We also very much have not deliberately assigned more resources to iOS compared to Android. That’s a total myth.

For a very long time we simply had more iOS devs than Android devs. This was also at a time when we were focused on shipping lots of features. By the time we hired more Android devs, work on features was paused to work on the migration to the current account.

Just to be clear - in the last 3 months alone on Android, we’ve shipped:

  • Dismissible Feed Items
  • Data Export
  • Golden Ticket Banner
  • Transaction Help Screen
  • Deep Links to different parts of the app

And two more things are rolling out in the next week : Bank Statements, and the Pulse Graph!

At this point, we are very close to parity, but when people talk about a disparity, they are generally at this point just referring to one thing - Targets.

So, the issue there is that we are currently reworking Targets completely for both Android and iOS. We’ve got a whole new system that we’re working on. It completely replaces the old system. This is one of the biggest priorities on our product team right now, and it’s being developed simultaneously (in fact, the most recent product screengrabs I personally saw were Android ones). I’m not sure of the complexities of it and how much work there is left to do, but it’s a major milestone that we’ll hopefully be able to launch this summer :grinning:

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Are month/statement start dates part of this new functionality? To set expectations it’s going to be the summer before we get them.

And is there any other functionality grouped in there that is not targets specific?

Would be great to get a list of what functionality targets will be delivering.

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Yes, from what I’ve seen.

After more than a year of this comment I read the Monzo Monthly Update: March which confirms that a half baked fingerprint recognition is going to implented for Android users.

Really disappointed the way Monzo are doing things every feature released recently seems to be half baked, perhaps deliberately to get feedback, but this doesn’t look good.
Pots were released with all the noise and after a long wait but they just lack most basic functionalities and now this. Biometrics security for App opening only, Seriously.

Are Monzo just trying to hand a lollypop to disgruntled Android users with this? I mean if for PIN viewing and other tasks still have to do ID upload and enter PIN what’s the point of building this. App is most of the time securely behind phone security so to me this is just waste if time. I

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Our feedback indicated strongly that the most common reason for Android fingerprint support was for app security.

We’ve chosen to ship this as soon as possible, rather than waiting longer to build in the back-end support which is required to allow fingerprint access to other features.

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Yeah I am sure you’re right. Just not as soon bit, that was over a year for a feature which is just not good enough.

Most people will soon realise that this is just a facade because when you’re inside the App after going through fingerprint recognition and want to view PIN, for example, you will need to send ID and selfie unlike our iOS friends.

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I may have addressed this before, but whilst I think that is a fair comment from a user perspective, it somewhat lacks nuance and context of what our last 12 months have looked like.

I don’t want to sound defensive, but it’s a little bit hard when I’ve seen first hand how hard everybody has worked.

Last April - only 9 months ago! - We got our banking license. That in itself was the culmination of a huge, huge amount of work but it also kicked off the beginning of our biggest challenge to date. Finalising our in-house systems, launching our current account on our processor, getting people onto our current accounts, and finally, putting together a plan to migrate everyone off our Beta and onto the current account, a project that is still ongoing, and actually will still be ongoing even after we shut down the prepaid scheme on April 4th, as we’ll have final contingency plans in place to help people who weren’t able to upgrade before the cut off date.

It’s a huge project. An absolute mammoth task involving literally everyone in the company, that also took place during a time of huge user growth, and huge company growth.

We realised that we basically needed to devote every single bit of engineering time to this project, even with all the new hires. So we froze feature development - this wasn’t an option.

The end result of that, is that you saw a huge period of time where feature releases shipped thick and fast - primarily on iOS, in 2016. Our Android app actually didn’t even launch until late 2016, and it wasn’t until sometime in 2017 that we even really had enough Android engineers to build out the features everyone wanted. Then you get a huge period of time, for the last 9 months, where feature releases slowed down massively, and we’re only just now getting back to a point where we can focus on product and features, and in the last couple of months have been able to ship more features.

So whilst it is technically correct to say that “One year ago you said X” - it ignores the nuance that 75% of that year was time we largely weren’t able to spend on feature dev.

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I fully appreciate that you are trying your best and engaging with users here but these sort of comments sometimes seem like Monzo didn’t plan well or you guys tried to woo people in with intentional or unintentional false hopes and half commitments.

Sorry for being harsh but just saying what I feel.

I think it’s very easy to say that in hindsight.

And no need to apologise - we welcome all feedback here :grinning:

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Just to chime in, I’ve recently sent my mate a golden ticket and he’s signed up on iOS. I never realised how different it was. Within 5 minutes, he showed me Labs, Sneak-peeks and he even has the option to open a Joint account. Something I’ve been desperate for for 6 months. Just irked me a little is all.

Still love the app though, Please let me get a joint account!

A few features are catching up thanks to the big list!

Hopefully the others get rectified soon,

It won’t be long and joint accounts will be in labs for everyone.

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Labs and joint accounts are on Android. Not sure why you didn’t see Labs, but joint accounts are only enabled for a few people at the moment but are being made available to everyone in Labs today. :tada:

If you’re not seeing Labs, maybe another Android user on the forums could post a screenshot of where they are in the app?