I’m using Android. The app has a bug that doesn’t come up super often, but is really annoying when it does. If I open the app in an area with poor signal, my account balance seems to show the amount that was there the last time I logged in. This is almost always wrong. Today, I opened the app briefly on the way into a supermarket that I use often. There’s no signal inside this supermarket so I wanted to make sure that I had enough, and it looked like I did. When I got to the till my card was declined and I ended up using my credit card. When I got outside and had signal again, I opened the app to check - it still showed the wrong amount for a few seconds before updating.
A really simple fix for this would be to just not show an amount on startup until the correct balance has been fetched. Showing the last known balance is just not useful at all. I’d rather see blank than an incorrect balance.
Even with a decent signal, when the app opens it refreshes the balance. For a moment I always think I’ve got loads of money and then all the transactions since the previous refresh lower the balance.
This is the same thing the Chase app does, for this reason. It shows a cached balance immediately and then fetches a new one, as that’s better than showing a blank area or one of those grey placeholders that are shown when loading data. It causes complaints about Chase too but it’s the better option from a UX perspective.
If it never showed the old balance and fetched a new one immediately and you had no signal, you’d have no clue what the balance was. At least this way you know what it was last time and it would generally be reasonable to have at least a rough idea of how much you’ve spent since then. I can’t imagine everyone checks their balance in the app before every purchase so you must have a general idea of how much is in the account before having the confidence to use it (and if you’re at the point you might run out of money that probably suggests a different problem).