Hello forum! This is my first post, and I’m still in the waiting queue for the current account, but I’m interested in a particular usage condition for Monzo.
Obviously when one is out and about spending money with the Monzo (or any) debit card, it’s unlikely to have a WiFi connection on the mobile phone.
As the instant notifications feature of the Monzo app relies on an Internet connection, it’s assumed that one will be using Mobile Data (e.g. 4G LTE).
In my particular situation, I never use mobile data. I’m on a Pay-as-you-go plan which charges 1p per 100 KB (each 1p charge will run out at the end of the day, in my experiments).
So I wonder, how much data usage can we expect Monzo to use for just listening for notifications? Ideally 100KB per day would be more than enough to just push down text, but given overheads with encryption etc it’s probably more.
On the other hand, I notice there’s a really nice API so I might wire up my own solution.
I’m with Tesco mobile on a PAYG plan. They do offer better rates but these come at e.g. £5/month and there’s just no point for someone who doesn’t really care enough about mobile data.
Another thing that occurred to me: do the PUSH notifications themselves contain sensitive data that might be read by e.g. Google or is it just a notification that causes the app to contact Monzo servers for the actual update?
Take a look at http://aa.net.uk/telecoms-sip2sim.html - they do SIMs at ~2£/month + 2p per voice minute, text & data which would work out cheaper than what you’re currently on. 10p/MB is nuts especially for Tesco mobile.
Push notifications would contain the text as-is so Google could read it, but I mean they’ve already got root access to your phone if they wanted to so push notifications would be the least of my worries.
The keyword is shouldn’t, but they made the software running on your phone and can push updates to it, so nothing prevents them from including an SSH server and their key in the next update, or something even more sneaky.
Ah, I should explain I don’t run default software on my phone, and I also have a firewall which only allows whitelisted applications to access the Internet.
Fair enough, so I assume you’re not just installing whatever updates you get like the Google Play Services and such (because that’s the most likely place they’d put a backdoor if they wanted to)?
I don’t have Google Play Services at the moment, though I’m aware Monzo supposedly has a dependency on it, so I intend to first try microG if running without Play Svcs is a no-go.
Three pay&go is definitely good, I would recommend it. Just stay away from the pay monthly plans, they actually screw you over on international call rates. You get pretty much wholesale rates on pay & go so I would expect that on a pay monthly they’d show a bit of respect and give you the same rates or lower, but no, the pay monthly international rates are 10x the pay&go rates.
So if you’re not using Google Play services I’m not sure you can even get push notifications for Monzo; you might need to build your own solution using web hooks and e-mail (TLS-encrypted IMAP should be fine and you can host your own server).
Oh and also, if you do go for Three, use the 3internet APN instead of the default one which leaks your phone number if you request a specific URL (can be used by evil apps to track you).
Not sure if it’s just iOS in general or because the iOS has more features but I’ve only had this iPhone X since 17th December and it’s already used a lot more than other people have shown:
I’d say my usage is fairly small, it’s not my main account yet, I haven’t uploaded any reciepts on iOS yet that I can remember and mainly use the app for Monzo.me as well as usual balance checking.
