| A couple reasons: 1. Those other platforms didn't really exist when we first launched. Messenger launched their platform about nine months after we started Penny.
2. (The real reason) We still don't think we can provide a better experience via a chatbot platform than we can with a standalone app. To motivate that second point: The benefit to a chatbot platform is that you meet people where they already are, and "signup" generally has lower overhead. The downsides are many, though. Most platforms don't allow for things like securely submitting username and passwords, e.g. when connecting a bank account (although Messenger is starting to allow webviews, which can be repurposed to handle this). Browsing your aggregated transaction history, changing the category of a transaction, viewing your balances, etc. are all poor fits for a chat interface (again, Messenger has only recently started to address this). Pre-populated responses aren't first-class citizens in most chatbot platforms. We get more control over the UI, e.g. when displaying animated graphs, in a standalone app than we do within chat. There is/was no way to lock individual chatbot threads behind passcodes to protect your privacy... and on and on :) Finally, there's also the problem of discoverability, which no chatbot platform has solved in a convincing manner. Downloading a standalone app is a pain, but once you get over that initial hurdle we think the experience is still significantly better than delivering Penny over a chatbot platform. |