Time to revive this thread! Monzo did something amazing! And it wouldāt have been possible without the incredible community over on Slack (not knocking this part of the equally amazing community )
A little over a month ago, I noticed an issue with PDF statement generation inside the appā¦ There wasnāt a burning need to generate one but I was curious about a comment somebody had made in another thread about their statementās balance not including āsomethingā (a savings pot iirc), anyway!
A day went by and I decided to ping a (non-urgent) message to Monzoās delightful COps and within a couple of hours I received an apologetic reply with a nice person trying to help figure this out for me Now, me being me, Iād already tried loads of troubleshooting steps (rebooting, re-installing Monzo, re-flashing the latest OS update for my phone, going back to a stock kernel, using different PDF viewers, etc. I tried to leave no stone unturned ). But sadly nothing had worked for me so I (wrongly) assumed that it must be something on Monzoās end.
Half a dozen messages later and we were no closer to solving the mystery. It was getting pretty late and my case had been escalated to a more senior member of the team for review the following day I heard back the next afternoon and on their end everything was perfect! No errors, no bad return codes from my account and every device they tried (including a Pixel 3XL, same as me) worked. I think it was fair to say that we were all scratching our heads that this stage Some more investigating was done and in the meantime I was sent a copy of my statement which Monzo had kindly generated for me
Because Monzo knew that everything was fine on their end, I went back to troubleshooting on my end it took a day but I was able to pinch another phone from somebody and tried the PDF statement generationā¦ IT WORKED!
This of course puts my device in the firing line what could possibly be the problem?! A flagship device running the latest software, using the same Monzo app & the same PDF viewer - yet all I could see was 2 blank pages on a PDF
There was nothing we could do, it had been narrowed down to āsomethingā on my phone but nobody had any idea what.
At this stage I thought Iād expand my search for an answer so I hit up the Android channel on Slack and there were no reports of a similar issue @daniel.cannon the joined in on the fun but also no luck figuring it out (this was in the days leading up to Christmas so not the best timing ) nevertheless the issue was still being investigated
(During this, I found that I couldnāt access my Statement History eitherā¦ Only the statement section of my Summary Daniel got that fixed as quick as a flash though )
However the statement generation itself wasnāt working for me
Christmas went by and @joecarter (I hope thatās tagged the right Joe ) suggested a logcat
to capture any errors (there was nothing obvious in the logs) the interesting part came from the logs Joe shared moments after!
01-03 20:40:40.095 27182 27182 I chromium: [INFO:CONSOLE(0)] "Using unescaped '#' characters in a data URI body is deprecated and will be removed in M71, around December 2018. Please use '%23' instead. See https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5656049583390720 for more details.", source: (0)
We had caught the smoking gun!
I then facepalmed quite hard ā¦ It was my fault all along!! I love to live on the bleeding edge of all hardware & software (and when you play with fire youāre bound to get burned! ) I was using Chrome Canary as my WebView client (a very unstable nightly release of Chrome) - turns out that Monzo passes the raw PDF data to Chrome for it to process & render it! And a feature which was depreciated as of Chrome 71 means that version 73 (which I was running) just breaks!
I flicked back to Chrome Stable and what do you know? It worked
If you stop reading here itāll look like I just wasted lots of time for Monzo
If all PDF creation was going to break with Chrome version 72 (which is coming at the end of January!!) then 1.4 million customers would be banging at Monzoās proverbial door wondering why their app doesnāt work
So I let the COp in on the brilliant news and gave a bit of detail on why and the case was closed
@daniel.cannon was on the case A few tweaks here and there to try and replace the depreciated mechanism but no luck It wasnāt until I tested on Chrome 72 that the full extent of the issue was revealed (we hadnāt tested 72 at the time, just 71 & 73)ā¦ In a few weeks this issue would crop up for everybody.
Then today I got a message saying the issue was fixed and the patch should roll out today or tomorrow! Moments later Dan Hughes (couldnāt find an @!) said it was in the wild and it was indeed! I tested it out straight away and yippee it was working
So this (bloody long!!) post is just my way of saying thanks to Monzo for being so open to the community, accepting bug reports and being more proactive than Iāve ever seen a company be It was really fun helping out and Iām glad this issue was caught well in advance of it becoming a widespread issue
Keep up the fantastic work!