I just got a new phone and logged into the starling app. It took seven minutes just so people know.
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Mine took several days and then they told me they’d approved it days ago 
suddenly it let me in after I brought it up with them
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That sounds like it may be a bug with the app?
They didn’t acknowledge it though, or they lied to me and had just left it sitting
Either way, not great handling
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I was approved on my new iPad within minutes, 15-20 or so.
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Starling’s iPad app has no more full functionality of the iPadOS than Monzo’s.
If Starling’s app was native, it would be very easy to take full advantage of iPadOS, with minimal code changes between the versions and would provide a much superior experience to the blown up iPhone app they give you. They wouldn’t need to update it independently to the iPhone app like they claimed they would have to if they were to support iPad properly.
Don’t have any analytics to hand right now, but my experience in the industry would err me on the side of yes, it is worth the effort. Optimising for iPad is not terribly difficult, and it’s another device folks can use the app on.
The apps work, granted, but no one likes using a tiny iPhone emulator or a blown up iPhone app.
Both banks are very lazy in this regard. And I don’t know why Starling gets a lot of praise for the few lines of code they added to make it work in full screen. They didn’t do that for the benefit of the user. They did it to cheat the App Store review process to get approved without having to do proper QC on older, smaller phones. They said as much in their own blog, if you read past the spin doctoring.
After careful consideration, we decided on running the app in full-screen. This will help us eliminate Apple review rejections and also improve the overall user experience for iPad customers.
Their system isn’t even designed to support multiple devices properly, so for most folks, it’s as pointless to use as Monzo’s is. Why did they opt out of macOS I wonder?
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Starling’s app is a unified app supporting all iOS devices. On iPad it fully supports split view, slide over, and full-screen in both portrait and landscape orientations.
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These are very basic bare minimum functionality expectations though. Something you’d criticise for omitting, not praise for including. Unified apps really have to go out of their way to not support those things, as it’s handled by the OS, and relies on the various iPhone viewports that already exist.
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They are indeed the expectations of what an iOS app should do when run on iPad. However many iOS apps do not offer this basic behaviour at all. Huge organisations like American Express have not bothered to support iPad properly either.
By all means accuse all those that can’t be bothered as being lazy. But including Starling in this is unfair. The app works in all orientations just as it should do. Just as Apple’s own apps do.
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Perhaps I just have higher expectations of what an iPad app should be.
iPad is my favourite device. It’s the device I use most, and if your app is rubbish, I’m going to notice when using it. Starling’s app is rubbish on iPad. Rubbish to the point that I stopped using it. Unless I’m using split view in portrait, I can see more information on my phone than my iPad! That’s worth criticising, not praising. The app experience on iPad is rubbish, because it is a lazy attempt at support. Most blown up iPhone apps are.
Amex are in the same boat as Monzo, where it’s just the iPhone app running in compatibility mode. That’s lazy too, and I don’t run those apps on my iPad either.
Freetrade, RBS, NatWest, among others, are apps more worthy of praise. Starling’s browser banking app is worthy of praise too; that’s a great experience on iPad. It’s iPad app is not in my view. They took 10 minutes to change a few lines of code so Apple would stop rejecting it because they couldn’t bother optimising the layout for the smaller iPhone SE. That’s the epitome of laziness.
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