It seems that big companies do not use their own fancy apps

For a full day after FNB unveiled its new app and corporate branding, iPhone users lamented on Twitter that they couldn’t download the rebooted version. Meanwhile, Android users had access pretty soon after it was released. Welcome to the vagaries of dealing with the Apple App Store.

As Twitter users fumed, and derided FNB’s new branding for being like a “sushi restaurant”, there was nothing the bank could do to complete the key piece of its new business focus – moving to advice instead of products. Personally, I think the new logo is great. It’s a modern refresh, cleaner and just as impactful.

My beef with the FNB app is slightly different – and seemingly widespread, given the feedback I’ve received – which is that, every time you log in, you are greeted with a splash page of product offerings or proffered credit card limit increases. But you can’t turn it off.

This seems unusual from a bank that made a name for itself for, first, launching smartphone banking, and, second, for leading the digital banking revolution.

But it reveals the paucity of thinking from big brands, which are still tied to what they want for the customer versus what the customers want for themselves. I have never met an FNB app user who has selected anything off that splash page of offerings, nor anyone who prefers having to click an additional time to get to actual service.

It’s akin to annoying marketing pop-ups on websites.

I often wonder if the makers of apps, websites or smartphones actually use their own services. Take Apple. A designer fiddled with something on the iPhone’s interface or in macOS for its laptops and took pride in condensing a Finder window’s buttons into a drop-down menu. This person clearly doesn’t use that option 15 times a day – as I and most other users do. Clicking an extra click (every single time), changing the view from “column” to “list”, is a step backwards.

The overhaul of the FNB interface is generally good, as is the new functionality, but prioritising marketing messages means one more unnecessary click.

This might seem churlish criticism of a new app that cost many millions to develop over many months, but, like Apple’s pointless insistence on minimalism, the overall user experience is lessened.

The new Woolworths app is in the same boat, for a slightly different reason. Having lost ground to Shoprite’s excellent Sixty60 delivery app, it launched Woolies Dash last year. I used it twice a month and had built up a useful history of orders to reorder from. When Woolies Dash was pulled into the main Woolworths app, the history vanished.

Worse, the reason I originally deleted the main Woolies app was because it kept spamming me with sale notifications.

I must turn on notifications in the Woolworths app to check on deliveries or if a product is out of stock. But the price I have to pay is an almost daily spam notification that I never asked for, nor can I turn it off. As they say on Twitter, that’s a #fail. That’s three companies that have failed me by focusing on what they want, not what I want. And they are not the only ones.

I do NOT want Twitter to tell me when someone I follow is doing a live something or other. But I can’t turn that off.

SuperSport’s app is so useless for rugby fixtures, I had to delete it. Inability to load a schedule seems an existential failure.

I deleted Facebook from my phone about five years ago, after my son was born, because its notifications went from mildly useful (seeing what friends are up to) to utterly annoying messages imploring me to come back and look at more advertising.

It seems that either the companies don’t use their own products or they are unable to prioritise the customer.