Say hello to iOS Health team at Monzo šŸŽ šŸ©ŗ

Hey everyone!

Weā€™ve got a new dedicated team within Monzo who are going to be focusing on the iOS version of the app and I thought itā€™d be great to introduce them in a bit more detail to you. Say hello to @iOS_Health :wave:

First up weā€™ve got @leewatkins who has been floating around on the Community for a while and heā€™s been kind enough to give us a little bio below:

Hi, Iā€™m Lee. Iā€™m an iOS engineer at Monzo. Iā€™ve been at Monzo for just over 3.5 years now. Iā€™ve worked primarily in two parts of the app;

  1. Signup and onboarding (for new customers,) building things like:
    ā€¢ the new, compact header on the Accounts List and
    ā€¢ some other stuff that most of you veteran Monzo users wonā€™t see :cry:
  2. Improving some of our core app features, especially Pots. Iā€™ve worked on things like:
    ā€¢ Salary Sorter,
    ā€¢ the Feed/Manage tabs on accounts and Pots,
    ā€¢ the Pots feed,
    ā€¢ virtual cards on Pots and
    ā€¢ paying from Pots
    In addition to being an iOS engineer, Iā€™m also a coffee lover and huge Formula 1 fan.

Weā€™ve also got @MikeMurray who has been with Monzo for a while but this will be his first proper visit to the Community. Mikeā€™s written a little intro for everyone to read here:

Hello, Iā€™m Mike :wave: Iā€™m one of the iOS Engineers at Monzo. Been here coming up for 2 years, in that time Iā€™ve worked on a few things:
ā€¢ Shipped the first version of Monzo Flex
ā€¢ Worked on some improvements to our existing loan application flow
ā€¢ Shipped the new top-up and debt consolidation loan flows
ā€¢ Worked on some new Open Banking features
Iā€™m quite passionate about Software Engineering, and spend time outside of work tinkering with technologies that interest me. Most recently Elm, Elixir, and Haskell.
Iā€™m also a huge petrolhead, and have recently got into the world of 1:10 scale radio control car racing.

Overall we want to improve how these bugs get picked up and resolved creating a slick feedback loop :pray:

To do this, we may change the format of what we require in bug reports but if thereā€™s any questions feel free to ask @iOS_Health or me :smiley:

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:tada: This is awesome, so glad that the issue(s) with iOS have been identified as a key point, and thereā€™s a dedicated team for this - I know @N26throwaway throwaway will be happy too! :stuck_out_tongue:

@iOS_Health - how can we, as iOS users help most? Should we just be using TestFlight & reporting every crash through there? Do you read them? Would it be better for us to duplicate issue(s) here?

Additionally, what key areas have you identified as the initial area to focus on?

<3 Thanks!

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This is amazing. Thank you Alan for pulling together and the whole @iOS_Health team.

(Sorry but someone has to ask: is there an equivalent for Android folks? :android:)

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Yes & yes, thatā€™s a great way to share crashes because TestFlight includes crash logs (if youā€™ve give permission to share those) which help us a huge amount. If youā€™d be able to include a brief description of what you were doing at the time in the notes, that helps us group crashes to see which are happening most often.

Itā€™s up to you - weā€™re just happy to have the data to help find the problems. I think that the forum will likely be the most convenient place to share the details because:

  • itā€™ll be easier to share those details here rather than in the tiny text box on the TestFlight report form, so feel free to share long-form information with us here.
  • if you can provide a date/time we can always go and look through TestFlight data and match up the crash report there with your report on the forum.
  • sharing on the forum also gives you the opportunity to come back and write up extra info when itā€™s convenient for you rather than having to do it on the go or while youā€™re busy with something.

What to share: if youā€™ve noticed specific usage patterns that cause crashes, that makes it much easier for us to replicate that problem and therefore fix it.

Weā€™re focussing on things that get in the way of users doing the job that they set out to do.
Weā€™re starting with:

  • forced logouts
  • crashes
  • then we hope to move on to slow app performance (slow scrolling, glitches that make you miss buttons, taps that donā€™t take you anywhere or donā€™t give you any feedback, those sorts of things)
  • and then (later) broken flows (things like back buttons not working, screens that donā€™t auto-dismiss, that sort of thing.)
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Me, in my Monday morning foggy malaise: How tf are Monzo going to integrate with the iOS Health app?

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Fortunately, Iā€™ve not experienced any of the first ones - so thatā€™s not something I can help with. Gladly will share all of the TestFlight crashes I have from the others though! If I notice anything out of whack, Iā€™ll share them here too - so that youā€™re aware :slight_smile:

Heart Rate monitoring when payments are taken, or when received. :stuck_out_tongue:

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This is brilliant. Loving the ambition to include broken flows. That would help a lot.

(Depending on what Apple come out with, Iā€™m potentially eyeing up an iPhone next time. But Monzo being a bit meh on iOS would genuinely keep me on Android).

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You werenā€™t the only one!

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Amended the title to cause less confusion haha

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Oh dear even with the change in title I was briefly excited to discover there was a way of linking my banking with my health data :laughing:

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Two things - I made the right connection but could I suggest iOS performance team @AlanDoe?

Secondly be really interesting to hear what happens in the depths of the coding. For example do you guys use any form of automated testing/TDD (I might have asked this before) and other quality engineering practices so where possible things get picked up early stages?

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Oh nice more app parity features to distinguish between the 2 platforms

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Financial health as a heart, should slot in right next to your heart rate/stress levels :smiley:

Would be nice, say for every 1 mile walked, but x into a pot. I know this can be done with IFTTT, but not with the native iOS health data

Performance issues aside I hope it doesnā€™t cause a further imbalance. Of course Iā€™m bias to Android but iOS have some pretty cool things (like advanced search) that Android doesnā€™t.

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This sounds great, but I do have a few questions about it.

Firstly, how detailed do you want our bug reports to be, in general? Are you just looking for trends or do you want us to document specific bugs in detail (I usually do this on Testflight but Iā€™ve never been sure if Iā€™m being helpful or not)? Do you want all Testflight users to do this (even iOS beta users) or are you more interested in users on stable/current releases? In the past, Iā€™ve submitted detailed reports and then re-submitted short reports when the same issue occurs again. Do you want us to do that every time?

Also, I think it would be helpful for the team to set out a ā€œhow to write bug reportsā€ post which, rather than generally telling us how to write reports, tells us how to write them specifically how the Monzo team would find most helpful. Sort of like Appleā€™s guide below, but specific to Monzo. Is that something you might be interested in doing?

Example - hereā€™s Appleā€™s advice for submitting bug reports properly, from the summer 2021 iOS 15 beta

When and how to submit feedback

File whenever you encounter a problem. If something you have used in the past doesnā€™t seem to be working now, or a new feature doesnā€™t seem to behave the way you thought it would, or youā€™re finding that apps are quitting unexpectedly (ā€œcrashingā€) or becoming unresponsive (ā€œhangingā€) or simply running too slow to be useable anymore, thatā€™s a problem!

**Start your feedback as soon as you can.**The Feedback Assistant app collects time-sensitive logging when you start a new feedback, so it can help if you start your feedback report close to when you saw the problem. You can always start and save your draft immediately, then finish and submit later.

Protip: If you can tell us, in your feedback, when the problem happened, it will help us pinpoint, in the log files, what was happening on your device at the time. If you can tell us the date and time it occurred, thatā€™s great, but even an estimate of how many minutes or hours before you started writing your feedback will help tremendously.

Give your feedback a clear and specific title. If you had to describe the thing that went wrong in a single sentence, what would it be? Youā€™ll have a chance to go into more detail in the description, but a title that quickly tells the story really helps us know what kind of investigation is going to be appropriate.

ā€œCannot download attachments from Mail messagesā€

ā€œSafari quits unexpectedly when loading front page of apple.comā€

ā€œAirDrop on my iPhone no longer sees my iMacā€

Provide as much detail as you can in the description. What were you doing before the problem occurred? What were you expecting would happen, and how did the problem differ from your expectations? Have you seen the problem occur more than once? Are you able to make the problem happen every time? (We call that ā€œreproducingā€ the problem.) What are the shortest or simplest set of setups you have to go through to make it happen?

Protip: Depending on which area (feature or app) you select while composing your feedback, we may ask a few more questions to get even more specific information about the problem.

Consider screenshots and screen recordings as a way to show as well as tell. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Screenshots and recordings can be very helpful for understanding a bug when there are many different words you could use to describe a symptom you are seeing or set of steps that you are going through. Detailed descriptions of how to capture screenshots and screen recordings are available on our support pages:

***Screenshots on iOS and iPadOS:*Take a screenshot - Apple Support

Screen recordings on iOS and iPadOS: Record the screen on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support

***Screenshots on macOS:*Take a screenshot - Apple Support

***Screen recordings on macOS:*How to record the screen on your Mac - Apple Support

***Screenshots on watchOS:*Take a screenshot on Apple Watch - Apple Support

Include all of the relevant file information that is needed. Depending on which features of the OS you are sending feedback about, there may be additional, specific logs or files that we ask for. When using Feedback Assistant on iOS or iPadOS, before you hit ā€œSubmitā€, if you see a ā€œGatherā€ link in the File Uploads section of your feedback, click on it to include additional logs that are relevant to the type of feedback you are reporting. Using Feedback Assistant on macOS, before you hit ā€œSubmitā€, if you see items in red in the File Uploads section of your feedback, click ā€œPreviousā€ to return to the Attach Files page and then, for each greyed-out item that remains, click on the question mark to see how to gather that information.

Make sure the information you want to submit is uploaded. Once you hit ā€œSubmitā€, your feedback and any files or logging youā€™ve collected will begin uploading. This can take some time, depending on your network connection and the amount of information, but it should continue with uploading in the background as long as your device is awake and connected to the Internet.

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This sounds like an excellent idea.

(But, in the meantime, I think @N26throwawayā€™a excellent posts could serve as a helpful template).

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Was that question even answered? Nope.

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Iā€™m interested so what is the answer or is the Android version considered to be perfect? :thinking:

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Itā€™s been a long time since Android apps have been the very poor relation

I remember the BBC launching their Sport app for iOS like a year before the Android app and this wasnā€™t 2007 or anything :sweat_smile:

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