False and misleading information

Íslandsbanki has started offering a smartphone app, with access to your accounts, make transfers, and a bunch of things they probably shouldn’t have bothered with. Having ran into issues once or twice where I wished I could just transfer some money on the spot, rather than having to find a computer, or remember some account numbers, I thought this had potential. Here’s my review of the android version, version 1.1.0. I wrote a review for the android market, or at least started to, but it requires reviews be twitter length. Here’s the full review…

Things that are just bad, silly or outright wrong

• Requires camera permissions. This seems to be for the built in QR code reader.
  1. There’s no need for building in a QR code reader! I have a separate app for that! This is a banking app!
  2. It crashes on my phone, (vodafone 845, android 2.1)
• Requires directly call permissions. This seems to be for the “connect me to a branch” feature. This is a common feature, that is commonly done badly. Instead of requesting permissions to directly call numbers, (which allows you to call any number anytime) the app should simply fire the android intent to request a call. This has the benefit for the user that a) they see what call is about to be made, b) they can choose to complete the call with a different service, such as skype, rather than the regular dialer, and c) it properly integrates with any other phone call apps, that might record, or track for the user.
• It’s an iPhone app? This is my only explanation for the UI. The back button and the menu button do nothing at all. There are UI buttons if you scroll down, and a cog wheel settings type icon that you have to press. Likewise, the currency converter section uses a custom built UI, rather than the built in android input methods. This means it looks different, the cursors are messed up, and the backspace button behaves weirdly. Really, use the built in input methods! Just make it a text box, with the numeric hints!
• The login screen has a font problem with the password
• The login screen doesn’t switch to numeric for the “auðkennisnumer” field
• Not all my accounts are shown! “Mína siða” only shows the top 2 accounts, plus the first credit card account. I have an empty account in position 2, so it doesn’t show the main account. (It does show up in my list of accounts)
• The screen showing the list of transactions is badly scaled and centered.
• The list of transactions doesn’t allow showing the full transaction details

The rest

Well, it does mostly work though. That’s something I guess. However, a half decent mobile stylesheet for the general website would probably have done just as well or better, and been a whole lot less work. If you’re going to make it native, it should be done properly.