Say hello to iOS Health team at Monzo 🍎 🩺

[l33t]

@patrice58

{BLURB}

I appear to have touched a nerve. I will remove my post for fear of it being too tongue in cheek for you.

@N26throwaway

here’s where I’ve mentioned the screen size thing before, with screenshots that capture the very subtle difference:

I never spotted it when I went to my 13 Pro lol. I think I may have noticed it more on a Max maybe though. I had to look at your screenshots to see what was wrong.

@N26throwaway

I do a fresh install every major release. New devices are always set up as new, no restoring from backups (don’t even have backups turned on).

Don’t run the iOS betas on my personal devices either, which includes my phone where I use Monzo.

That eliminates a few things anyway, I dont think 16 Beta had as many issues that lingered on when it came out finally but I know there was a weird one where a tester had a dialogue problem with images/text (system dialogue prompt but cant remember where it was) and it continued in the RC to which they thought it had not been fixed but a fresh device install fixed it.
I had heard of really weird things happening to profiles in previous betas as well that cause RC issues.

@N26throwaway

When I’m opening the app it’s more of than not because of a notification or to check on my balance tab in trends (where I will usually play with the slider a bit because the haptics make it fun and I’m a fidget toy person). That’s probably more intensive than someone who opens it to check recent transactions and closes it again.

The current Trends performance issues might be playing a role too.

Yeah I dont go into Trends often, maybe once a week depending on the spending pattern as my spending is quite regular.

@N26throwaway

Phone gets hot in this situation too, so no doubt is something else impacting battery life.

Hot is really not a good sign, I mean that sounds like its hitting the cpu hard which will slaughter battery life like a game.

To be honest you having such a borked experience must be very useful for them to see if it can be recreated.

[N26throwaway (Sir Tom MacMonier)]

The trouble with this one (the one I suspect is a memory leak) is finding a reliable way to recreate it. It’s affecting a good few folks, so that’s positive, means there’s more data to collate. But I haven’t been able to discern if it’s related to the known trends performance issues (which should be getting fixed soon, if they weren’t in the most recent update), or if it’s something else. The addition of overview to labs correlates too, but doesn’t directly cause the issue (it happens even if it’s disabled).

I’ve found a reliable remedy for it, which is the reset session tip I’ve shared above. It’s worked for everyone who’s tried it. But I’m still prodding and guessing at what actually causes it. My best guess right now is it’s tied to your transactions, specifically new ones. So the more you use your card, the more transactions you make, the faster the symptoms of a memory leak start to present themselves. It’s still very much a guess though. If you let it get far enough without resetting session, the app will eventually crash, at which point if you’re on TestFlight you can submit a report.

It could just be some innocent completely unrelated innocent thing somewhere else in the app and I’m just zeroing in on the wrong correlations. But until I figure out what’s causing it, I’m not going to be able to determine a reliable way to reproduce the issue. One of the reasons I’ve been reluctant to start a thread for it, as for all I know it could have been tied to the crashing issue, or the trends issue, which are both known.

I don’t think it’s related to historic transactions. You’ve tried that. I’ve tried replicating it, so that was probably just a fluke correlation too. Next best guess would be it’s related to plus, as that seems to be a common thread, but it could just be that most of us on here are likely to be subscribed to plus or premium.

I do tend to be more bug prone than most. I don’t know if that’s just because of my field and I notice them more than most, or if it’s just through my tenacity to play with things until they break and then try to figure out how/why and recreate it. Or I’m just more sensitive to them. Thinking back to my crashing thread, one or two folks eventually did share it’s something they experience too but just dismissed it is a quirk, so that could certainly be at play too.

Monzo happen to have a community where I can come to report them too, which I generally do, because it’s something I use daily and is important enough to warrant it. With most other things, if I can fix it with basic troubleshooting I’ll just forget it about it. It’s apathy, and I suspect that’s how the vast majority of folks will tend to feel until it starts to become a plague.

[JIMMWX (Village Idiot)]

Just adding a few thoughts that are relevant to the title and aim of this thread.

General

• I’ve just re-installed monzo onto a new device (iPhone 14 Pro) and I’ve noticed a significant improvement in performance so far. None of the lagging on the feed accessed from the latest activity feed and currently none in trends either.
• Now, this may be because in that time the Monzo team have been busy pushing performance improvements to the main app (I’m not currently using the TestFlight version) or the fact the app is a fresh install on a new device. I’ll monitor over time and let you know if it get’s progressively worse or not
• Trends doesn’t seem to hang yet, no accounts connected in and a fresh install may be helping with this

Specific Bugs

• I’m still seeing it where if you click onto the “latest activity feed” and select a transaction, when you go back instead of taking you back to the feed, it spoofs back to the overview screen.

[leewatkins]

@SebH

Would you prefer the rule to be “just always submit”?

I’d say that if you’ve submitted a few reports for the same issue, its probably on our radar, so you don’t need to submit all of them. Once we’ve released a fix we’ll let you all know, and then might ask you to submit another batch in case we haven’t quite nailed the fix.

[leewatkins]

@N26throwaway

What’s the best way to help with this stuff for those of us not utilising the TestFlight build? The app still directs us to the forums for here for bug reports, so is this the only/preferred outlet, or is there something else you’d prefer me to do in addition to or instead of flagging on here?

Flagging issues on the forum and tagging us is perfect, and probably the most useful way to share info. If you’ve managed to find a way to repeatedly cause the bug/crash, writing up the steps to make it happen is super helpful.

And finally, if you’d share crash reports (as I’ve described here) that would also be really helpful.

[leewatkins]

Hey Olu

Sorry to hear about this problem. We’ve been aware of this and have made a few changes to try and fix this. iOS App versions from 5.7.0 onwards should be more stable and stop logging you out randomly. If you keep seeing this happen, please report is and pop me a DM with the email address that you use on your Monzo account and I can take a look into this specific problem.

[SebH]

For what it’s worth: I had been logged out randomly quite a few times up until recently, but since that release Monzo has not asked me to login again! So the fix does seem to be working.

@N26throwaway

I do a fresh install every major release. New devices are always set up as new, no restoring from backups (don’t even have backups turned on).

Don’t run the iOS betas on my personal devices either, which includes my phone where I use Monzo.

I’m terrible for this!

I haven’t done a proper (no backup restore) fresh install since 2016 and I run betas on my phone continually. However, the extent to which this causes problems is a bit overblown. I very rarely encounter any issue which isn’t fixed shortly after it comes up (in the next beta build or two, usually) and almost never is it significantly impactful to using the phone. Generally, RC releases “wipe out” any beta cruft ready for the next beta to start and I occasionally install updates via IPSW files to avoid the cumulative impact of constant OTA updates. Once or twice, I’ve had to use iMazing to update via IPSW in DFU mode without losing data - and even that has got my device up and running again. This has been in cases where an OTA update has crashed on me.

Of course, I do generally assume that bugs could be a specific result of my circumstances and not general - but then that’s the point of bug reports, as I see it. They gather the diagnostics to allow assessing if it’s a “beta issue”, something else unique to me, or a general app bug. The more other people submit reports too, the more they can be cross-analysed. I always run the Testflight Monzo app for this reason.

[walderston (Adam)]

there is always a constant crash when you force quit the app then open it again. It always crashes the first time it is opened.
Subsequent times its opened (where it hasn’t been force quit) doesn’t result in the crash.

[SebH]

It’s interesting that you say that.

I have experienced the same exact thing in the past, but not lately. Generally, I open the Monzo app to use it briefly, then close it from multitasking pretty much straight away when I’m finished because I use it ad-hoc and berg know if I will need it again for a bit. I leave the app for a second to “go into backgrounding mode” before I quit it, but I don’t seem to get a crash next time I open it?

[walderston (Adam)]

hmm… it was doing it minutes ago…
I force quit all my apps (I never normally do this) to record a video of it doing it and now its not … wonder if it was me all along

edit: got it doing it again… Its if I open the app ‘too quickly’ after force quitting it.

[SebH]

At a guess, it’s probably that you force-quit it too quickly: not giving Monzo enough time to go into the backgrounding state before quitting, leading to it failing to save-state properly and being unable to resume on next launch, resulting in a crash.

It’s also possible that you are launching it again “too quickly” as there may be background cleanup going on still and then an immediate re-launch causes a crash?

[SebH]

PS: @N26throwaway The other point to this (that I forgot to mention!) is that continually upgrading-over iOS with the same backup probably more closely recreates how “normal people” use their phone, and is therefore valuable feedback. I appreciate that they won’t be doing so as often, given the number of builds involved in beta releases, but they are likely to do so a lot. Their first thought when experiencing a bug is also unlikely to be to give their phone a fresh install, so even if that would fix the bug anyway, if there is a way to fix it more gracefully (for the user) then that would be preferred. Running my phone this way therefore may reveal bugs which are likely to affect normal users, but which we otherwise wouldn’t uncover if testing on a “clean” device, so I see my feedback as valuable and hope it is.

That isn’t to say that bugs are not sometimes caused entirely by using beta iOS, as by definition there will be iOS bugs in the software which may interact with apps in unpredictable ways, but I am confident analytics data will probably point to the cause of individual bugs. I’m also always happy to run isolation testing where I restore to a public release to see if a bug is still present, if required.

Additionally, I do read Apple’s own release notes for new builds (when available), so if a bug is caused by a known issue in iOS I will already be aware of the cause and will mention this if/when reporting to Monzo. Sometimes this is helpful as changes in APIs can require refactoring of code before public release, otherwise the public would see the issue too, so a report to make Monzo aware (in case they aren’t) acts as a way to give early warning to allow time for that refactoring to happen before the public ever upgrade.

[michaelw90 (Michael)]

Hi @iOS_Health team. I have a bug for you.

The new app evolution transaction feed doesn’t mark transactions as viewed and so when I get a new transaction the notification badge is higher than it should be.

If I go to the normal feed by tapping on my Monzo card, it clears fine.

This is really really annoying. Pls help

[Sachaz (Sacha Zarb)]

Great to see, be good for a fix on the feed issue, and having to kill and restart the app to get it to update

[leewatkins]

Hey @michaelw90, thanks for reporting that. Could I ask that you share that feedback via the “Give us feedback” button on the new home screen? That will route the message directly to the App Evolution team working on that feed

[Paulw (Paul)]

Oh this is new. I’m trying to submit a twitter link for a logo. After pressing submit, this error appears. No idea what it means.

[mikez]

@Paulw

I’m trying to submit a twitter link for a logo

Possibly relies on the borked Twitter API…

[Paulw (Paul)]

Yes of course. Bloody Elon

[DeclanC]

It’s great to hear this is happening. I’ve had performance issues since 2019 when I first started using Monzo. The main problem is swiping left and right between pots - very laggy for me.

Hopefully you guys can get it sorted!
Thanks.