Monzo for Android - Teardowns & Deep Dives 👨‍💻

I wasn’t aware of the newsletter either :man_facepalming:

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Right, what the proverbial is up with the menu bar spacing on the latest Android beta?!

Now then, now then…

I also thought it looked ‘off’. So time for a photoshop analysis. Which reveals… :drum:

It’s spot on.

Basically, the image (provided) is 880 pixels wide. The centre therefore is 420 pixels and 420 pixels slices right through the middle of the ‘Premium’ Icon. Then working things back & forward between the icons and you have exactly 168 pixels in-between the centre of the 5 icons. Pixel perfection!


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Is there any indication on what the macro stuff all those developers at Monzo are working on at the moment? As they’re not really communicating that much anymore I don’t really have a macro “feel”. I remember that they’re porting Summary to Trends, and I am sure there’s various minor changes to Flex going on as it’s a money maker. But beyond that… what’s the big picture at the moment?

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I don’t think there is one.

The few interviews that the new CEO has done aren’t illuminating and at a product level the emphasis seems to be on short term interventions to make money (so Plus, Flex etc).

That aside, I can’t really see a bigger picture.

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Do we have a community wish list for things that are lacking? The same things often come up, and there are thread with votes, but no aggregate of those. You do an extensive poll once in a while I guess, which is probably the closes thing to it? Still feels hard to see an overview of “stuff the community keeps asking for” though, heh.

But besides that, it would be nice to have some sort of idea what’s coming. Perhaps because Starling plays so nasty they’re just unwilling to reveal product directions anymore as it’s commercially sensitive and Starling will, inevitably, try to grab the limelight by getting in first, regardless of their lack of innovation.

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→ Try this link ← It’s a link to a :monzo: community page, honest, it’s not a rickroll…

which should show the sorted feature requests in order of highest-to-lowest votes.

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Thanks for that, somehow missed it when it was posted.

It’s interesting to consider which of these are possible vs impossible at the moment. Plus/Premium for Joint Accounts really isn’t possiblel any other way, whereas the other most voted for items are more like bugs where there’s a workaround.

So @davidwalton 's amazing teardowns are back up again.

Aside from Neon cards, an interesting reference to CrowdCube. Given they’ve just binned their app, I wonder if it’s an integration to see investments in the Monzo app? (I might be projecting desire more than reality there though!)

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Where do we get those again? I signed up for an email prompt I think but nothing came through afaik…

The neon cards? If you commented before midnight last night on the other thread, @AlanDoe should have been in touch; or you can reach out to him too

Otherwise it’s refer 2 people

You mean this brilliant public service from @davidwalton ?

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A beginner’s guide to decompiling APKs

I made a brash statement late last night that stoked the interest of a few members, that decompiling APKs is easy (and you can do it from your phone, iphone too, without needing to install any special software), and if more folks knew that, more would have done it because they lack patience.

Just to be clear, I’m not going to be teaching you what @davidwalton does, so I hope this doesn’t step on his toes too much; decompiling an APK is but a single step of the process to what David does.

What it will do is show you how you can take a look at the Monzo app’s resources and have a peek at some of the various components, including the card graphics from todays announcement.

  1. You need the Monzo APK. On an iPhone I got mine from here.

  2. Download the APK and save it to your device. On an iPhone mine goes to the downloads folder of the files app.

  3. In the browser of your choice, go to www.decompiler.com

  4. Tap on choose file and upload the APK you downloaded in step 2.

  5. Wait patiently for the APK to be uploaded and decompiled. It’ll take a minute or so.

  6. Once it’s decompiled, you’ll find yourself at the root of the file tree. Your attention is drawn to the big blue download zip button just above the file list. Tap it.

  7. Give it a moment to zip and proceed to download it. On my iphone, mine again goes to the downloads folder of the files app by default.

  8. Locate the zip file in your files manager app (Files on iPhone) and uncompress it. On iPhone, long tap on the zip file and swipe to the uncompress option.

  9. Once it’s been uncompressed you’ll have a folder you can open. Open it and browse to your heart’s content. You might find something cool.

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This is interesting, thank you!

I didn’t realise you could do this on the iPhone - we’ve only every seen teardowns from Android (first from @nexusmaniac then from @davidwalton) so I kinda assumed that it wasn’t possible on Apple!

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I mean it’s still just an android APK you’re decompiling, only my tool of choice here is an iPhone!

It’d be the same process on an android device, you’d just likely be using Chrome instead of Safari, and whatever android’s equivalent of the files app is.

It’s nothing terribly fancy, but if your only goal is to take a peek inside and have a nosey, it gets the job done.

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Ah ha. Sorry, I read it too fast, I assumed you were using the iOS version - but that makes more sense!

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Thanks for this. I never knew this was even possible until now!

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Fantastic instructions! :+1:

Love the fact that the iOS device is simply a ‘computer’ to deal with the decompiled Android .apk file (aka: nothing-to-do-with-iOS)!

Brilliant.

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On the subject of teardowns:
Screenshot_20220615-150859

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