What’s Going On With Steward Bank’s App?

Steward Bank has been the one bank to fully embrace and innovate on the digital front. In less than half a year they’ve launched Kashagi, *263# Banking and most recently Sosholoza. These are all great digital products which makes it surprising that the Steward Bank application has not been working as users expect.

Ever since updating my phone to Android 9 I haven’t been able to actually use the application and initially, I thought this was something that would be solved as the application is optimized for the latest software but the months have passed by and the application still crashes.

What’s happening?

Whenever I try to open the Steward Bank application, I’m met by the login screen and when I enter my details the app force closes and I’m forced to use the harder to navigate USSD menu. I recently went to Steward Bank’s app listing on the Google Play Store and quickly I realised two things;

1. Steward Bank acknowledges the problem and claims to have fixed it.
2. User reviews seem to suggest that if you’re on Android 9 the problem hasn’t been fixed yet.

The fix?

On the Play Store listing under the What’s new section Steward makes the following claim:

Last Updated Dec 21, 2018

This release resolves the issue of the app crashing at boot.

When I read this I was pretty surprised because that’s the same error I was experiencing. I then went through the reviews and lo and behold as recently as February many users on Android 9 were still having problems. Now, this is not to say that Steward Bank lied. Their December 21 update could have solved an existing problem for other users whilst going on to create another problem for the few users running Android 9.

Anyway, here are some of the users who seem to be having trouble with the app on Android 9:

Is Steward working on a fix?

We got in touch with Steward communication earlier this morning and we are still waiting for their response but this is probably something they are working on and I’m pretty sure this is something they’ll be looking to fix sooner rather than later.