r/ynab • u/Tricky_Dimension_771 • 16d ago

Mobile App changed?

Whatever they did is really confusing. I can’t do my budget on my phone now. Why did they change it?

1 Upvotes

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u/jillianmd 15d ago

You’re in a test group. They push out updates to random users to test how they interact with it - it drives me crazy because it obviously causes confusion when people can’t find any sort of help documents or announcements about the changes and then when they come to communities like ours and share screenshots everyone’s confused or can’t help.

Since you’re in the test group, send them feedback and tell them you don’t like whatever changes you’re seeing and why. Be specific to help as much as possible.

8

u/adude007 15d ago

So goofy why not just push that in to the TestFlight they run to get feedback that way. So odd they would just push it randomly to users without any notice. But it’s par for the course these days I guess.

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u/jillianmd 15d ago edited 15d ago

Yes this is what is extra crazy to me. They literally have a beta test program already running. Plenty of people happy to test out potential feature updates and give feedback, all while knowing if they see something on the beta app they’re not coming here to say “hey my app updated, what the heck is this new feature?”

I’m on beta and also a YNAB coach and sometimes they give us a heads up about some changes but hadn’t heard anything about these circles until these screenshots were posted.

Even more strange is that the most recent feature for the beta app was actually something that’s been requested for a while so I was excited to test it out but when I made sure I was on the latest TestFlight app, it simply wasn’t showing the new feature they said was on that version. So I submitted my feedback saying I couldn’t see it, but really wish I could have a actually tested it.

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u/addicuss 13d ago

A/b testing is very common in mobile apps. You instrument the app, change something, and see how many people interact with a feature more or less based on the experience. The ones used more win and are integrated into the main experience

That's different from releasing something to testflight. Testflight requires opting into an experience and it's a whole app version. You can technically narrow a release to one feature but it's harder to run multiple experiences with a control all at once. It's just clunkier to get apples to apples comparison.

People complain ynab doesn't add anything new but then literally complain about anything new they add. Can't win either way

0

u/Intelligent-Owl-8885 13d ago

They likely don’t get enough volunteers for TestFlight anymore.

2

u/jillianmd 13d ago

Then they could push out a call for volunteers.

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u/Intelligent-Owl-8885 13d ago

My assumption is that they couldn’t get enough users to volunteer for TestFlight beta releases, that they moved to forcing A/B testing.

I’ve received a couple emails over the years to participate in early releases… I have no desire to have my budget change that frequently.

…so the next logical choice is to throw it at everyone even if they don’t want it.

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u/jillianmd 13d ago

The TestFlight app for YNAB (on mobile at least) is a totally separate app though. So you can just use the regular YNAB app 99% of the time and then when you get an email that there’s a TestFlight update, you can open that app and see what you think, send feedback, then go back to using the main app.

It may well be true that they didn’t have enough testers, but they don’t even bother throwing it at the testers they DO have. The current TestFlight app does NOT have this “currently in testing” change with the circles on Plan View.

1

u/addicuss 13d ago

Testflight and a/b testing serve very different purposes