One out, one in
One out, one in
For many years I have used the PocketMoney app on my iPhones and despite some problems on occasion, usually with poor upgrades, it has remained one of my most used apps.
It is easy to get stuck in one way of working and to not try anything new, and the longer that goes on the harder it gets to move. Fortunately, the developers of PocketMoney helped me to make the move with their latest update; it suddenly appeared and I had to upgrade my old financial database to use my historic transactions in the new version. This failed immediately and continued to fail every time I tried.
Eventually the developer posted a message that it would be fixed urgently. More than a week later it still does not work properly for me and in the meantime I had made efforts to try the new version, and the experience just got worse.
You now have to pay to remove adverts that suddenly appeared, to get support you have to buy a silver or gold membership and worst of all everything that made the app so useful for so many people has gone. It is a total disaster and it would appear that the developers did not understand why people like me used PocketMoney above much more complicated and feature-rich offerings.
I have used many apps over the past decade and never have I seen one destroyed so quickly by the people building the app.
So, reluctantly I spent some time trying alternatives such as MoneyWiz and eventually decided to pay a reasonable £4.99 for Account Tracker Pro.
And what a difference! It is simple to set up, has decent syncing between Mac (£19.99 for Mac version) and iPhone / iPad, which is something PocketMoney always struggled with, and by all accounts the developer is responsive, considered and the type of person I am happy to support.
My finances are back how they should be and after all of the hassle I am managing them better now than I was at the start of next week so it all turned out well.
What I did realise was that apps are potentially more important than the devices we use every day and in the wrong hands the impact can be annoying at the least and very problematic if you really do rely on a particular offering.
My advice, do not enable automatic updates and if you have specific apps that are very important to you, wait for feedback from others before you update. Be careful out there…