I’m tired of testing your mobile apps
Dear mobile banking/payments/whatever developer:
I am very excited to have my new Droid X phone. I love the functionality, it has made my life much easier to manage. I am however, tired of you putting crap in the Android Market and not testing it. Maybe you should actually PURCHASE one of these phones before you submit your shoddy code to the general public (who, by the way, can comment on your shoddy code).
Last week, I downloaded a payments application that wanted me to select my month of birth – a fairly easy task, however they seemed to only offer ELEVEN of the twelve months in the year (my birth month, October, was missing). That is something that should be caught during the QA process, WAYYYYY before uploading it to the Android Market. Do you not get the fact that you lose credibility in the marketplace when you forget a freakin’ month in the year? What will you do with my checking account data if you can’t get the months of the year correct?
Also, who’s running your requirements process? Do you actually ask users what they want in an app, or simply put something up there and hope 3 people will use this. I just installed the Android Banking app from a heavily-funded Firethorn Holdings and to summarize, it’s crap. Feces. Sh*t. The app gives me less functionality than Mint, in a lovely black-and-white color scheme. Maybe they hired a former mainframe programmer who doesn’t realize that these devices support COLOR.
Please, developers of mobile apps – gather requirements from prospective users, write good code, test thoroughly, regression test if you change your app, then do some USABILITY testing before you let someone in Bangalor upload this stuff to the Android Market. Once it’s installed, used once and deleted, it’s hard to get the user back to reinstall.
