Having a banking app that takes 20 seconds sometimes to update is pretty crap, regardless of who it is. I donāt get this with my other banks so I donāt get why this isnāt prioritised, Iām not the only person to mention it either.
On the one hand, Monzo claims to be more a software house than a bank, but isnāt doing a great job at either.
Who knows what their reasons are but itās not a good state of affairs, regardless.
A short(fast) cut; From āHomeā, tap on Transfers (middle icon/arrows), then once that display loads, tap on āHomeā to go back - the feed will update. Yes, it is 2 taps, but it forces a feed update, is quick and one action Iāve got used to for checking the feed is current.
But we donāt know how/if Monzo priortise things. Iām guessing as much as everyone else, just trying to do so without quite so much rhetoric and negativity.
Once again, a little more transparency on what IS and ISNāT being worked on wouldāve been useful so anything you can share with us would be appreciated.
This is right! We cache the entire feed offline, and in general only re-sync the last 7, 30 or 90 days as appropriate. About once a week weāll re-sync the whole lot, but we do that month-by-month working backwards in time, so youāll always get the most recent first.
Spot on: when you receive a push notification for a transaction, the app wakes up in the background to pre-emptively fetch that feed item, so that things feel faster.
We prioritise updating the balance before updating the feed, because knowing your balance is generally the priority when you open the app.
Unfortunately this isnāt a new thing, but itās certainly something thatās got gradually worse over time. Each new feature brings new API requests, which adds a little more delay. My team are working on making it better now.
There are a few different strands to the network performance work weāre doing, so I want to take these in turn:
Request Volume
We currently make a very large number of separate API requests when you launch the Monzo app. Whilst this granularity is good for us as developers (e.g. reasoning about how things are structured), it sucks on mobile devices where latency hurts us most.
HTTP/2
There are a couple of approaches weāll be taking here: the first is that weāre rolling out HTTP/2 support for external APIs. This gives us request multiplexing for free, which is much more efficient than the current simultaneous requests approach we take now, and avoids the problem of queue starvation if many requests are queued up.
Combined Responses
The second is to combine API responses so that responses are structured to represent app āscreensā rather than collections of ātypes of thingā (balances, accounts, transactions, etc.) This means fewer API requests to build any given screen, which again means less time waiting.
Communicating Status
This has been alluded to above with the āloading screensā comment: itās currently unclear when updating the balance what the app is actually doing. That means you canāt trust that your balance has been updated, and donāt have a clear idea of the time itās taking. You feel you have to force it to manually update to reassure yourself itās right. Thatās not good enough.
Since Monzo works offline and doesnāt make you log in each time, we need to represent the status of the balance you see when you open the app. Weāre working with our designers to communicate this properly.
Non-Network Performance
āTime to update balanceā isnāt just the network time, itās the performance of the app as a whole: how long does it take to launch, or to render things on the screen? How long does it take to be useable? Are all the interactions ābuttery smoothā. This is one of the yardsticks with which weāll measure our teamās success over the next 3 months.
We really care about this stuff. My Monzo user number is #8. I have 4 years of feed history, 8,000 transactions at 2,000 merchants, 800 payees. When there are performance issues, weāre the ones who feel them the most keenly
This is our focus now, and weāre going to keep the updates flowing so you can see the work weāre doing
I second this - Iām sure a lot of user frustration on this site would be toned down with a more visible roadmap of what is being worked on and when and what isnāt (like my long requested joint overdraft facility sniff). For those that are rejected or low priority some explanation updated regularly would bring Monzo back in my eyes to that great firm that promised to disrupt the legacy banks in the way they treat their customers!
A quarterly update of a list of things being worked on, things that are possibly next (not a commitment but a āmakes sense if we do X after Yā), and things not being looked at that they have an eye on.
Doesnāt need to be exhaustive, nor plastered with explanation. Just a feature, a status, and a note.