Approach to app development

I was wondering if the Dozens team could share any info on how they’re approaching app development. Lots of fintechs have gone for iOS devices first, with Android a few months later. And Monzo (famously) is pursuing a “minimum viable product” approach where they create a basic set of functionality then iterate on them.

So two questions I suppose:

  • should we expect Android and iOS to go live together with feature parity?
  • how “complete” should we expect the app to be? Will it look finished / like the mock ups on day one, or will functionality be slowly added over time?

Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer our questions! :+1::grinning:

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Just remembered that I had meant to come back to you on this. Sorry!

Our goal is to have as much of our app working from Day 1, including Spend (your transactions), Track (budgeting), Save (savings and bonds) and Invest (does what it says on the tin).

In the case of our earliest users, it is possible that the main interface of the latter area will work, but there will not (yet) be products to invest in, however the bonds should be available from the start. This is a great deal more than MVP and that is why we are testing and not just releasing to everyone today.

That is not to say that there will not be changes and upgrades as we go, but we want to offer our customers a working integrated solution as soon as we can. There will be improvements to “My Account” pages and also to the look and feel of aspects such as the FAQ, but the main areas should be working.

We are developing this for Android and iOS in parallel (there’s a bit of internal friendly competition between those of us on each platform as we get tiny improvements before the others) and so users can definitely expect feature parity from the beginning.

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Are you planning on having any beta group for testing?

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funny you should ask :wink:

more news on this shortly

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Thanks, Rob! And :crossed_fingers: fingers crossed :crossed_fingers: for beta testing soon! :soon:

If I could ask a follow-up, do you know what your policy is on using more than one device? Starling is quite elegant in allowing more than one, whereas Monzo is a little more cumbersome - and you can only use a maximum of two devices, and then only when one is Android and one is iPhone.

Did not know that about Monzo. Never occurred to me that would be an issue since Ive never run into issues using my existing bank accounts on multiple devices. Hoping it won’t be an issue with this. P

:eyes: watching this space

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I’m hoping the size of the app on Android will be reduced 94mb seems excessive? , maybe its just me.

I don’t think that 94MB (though interestingly, my Dozens app is 132MB apparently) is excessive for a banking app where all of the banking features are in that app.

For reference, my Monzo app = 119MB, Revolut app = 122MB, HSBC app = 78.48MB, Barclaycard app = 64.45MB

So the other mobile first bank apps on my phone are roughly comparable in size and the legacy bank apps, which don’t offer as many features within the app aren’t actually all that far behind in size tbh.

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