I’m not sure what’s going on on the iOS development side of things, but through each update the app has been getting slower, laggier, and buggier with each release.
Is anyone able to pinpoint with which release exactly these issues began occurring?
The issues seem to have begun for me around the time the crashing bug from swiping through pots was first introduced, around September last year.
Hey Tom, I’m an iOS engineer here at Monzo working on Monzo Plus and Premium.
We’re very aware of the performance issues on the iOS app, and personally I’m seeing a lot of the problems that others on this thread are seeing (I’ve had my Monzo account for 5 years and have 2 connected accounts).
I just wanted to give you a quick update with some of the steps we’re taking to solve this:
I recently wrote a proposal where I did an in depth look at the scroll performance issues on the main and external feeds, which generally shows sub par performance for common actions (downloading transactions, scrolling to the home card, scrolling through the feed). This gives us clear data on exactly how bad it is for a single user, and has also helped to identify some of the main problem areas in the code. On the back of this we’ve got a bunch of changes which are being tested internally now that should improve both crashes and performance, and we hope to release these to all users once we have more confidence.
We’re also aware that we’ve fixed performance issues in the past, but things have still regressed. To tackle this we’ll be collecting performance data via Apple’s MetricKit (as long as users opt in), so we can monitor real world performance of each release; this should help us understand what exactly causes bad performance, e.g. high numbers of pots, transactions, external accounts, etc. We’ll also be writing a suite of performance tests that will be run against every single code change we want to make, so we can ideally catch issues before they even get to TestFlight.
We hope to then use this same approach to monitor and improve performance across other key interactions in the app, for example launch, switching tab, tapping on a transaction, etc.
Thanks for that update! What you’re doing here sounds absolutely awesome! The insight you’ve shared is very interesting too and much appreciated. I’m glad you’re taking the performance issues as seriously as you are.
Hey Alex, are you seeing lag on your Monzo account(s) and Pots or on your connected accounts? They’re implemented differently and the improvements we’ve made in this build just affect connected accounts
No worries, thanks for reporting anyway! We’re aware of the other issues on the main account and should hopefully have some improvements soon, but not in this build I’m afraid.
I don’t believe we’ve made any changes to make that could make it worse in this build, but we’ll keep an eye on the performance metrics to be sure.
Thanks for the feedback though, really appreciate it!