Monzo is a banking service and app offering digital and mobile-only financial services. Their mission is to make money work for everyone. To sign up new customers, the Monzo app captures images of an identification document (such as passport, driving license, or ID card) and takes a selfie video to prove that the identification documents are for the applicant.
What they did
Early versions of the Monzo app used camera2 APIs. Random crashes and odd behaviors on some devices led to 25% of potential customers not proceeding beyond the identification capture and selfie video steps.
To address these challenges, Monzo turned to CameraX, a Jetpack support library
designed to make camera app development easier, to implement their image and
video capture requirements. Using
CameraController, Monzo implemented
the identification document image capture using the
takePicture()
method. For the selfie video, they used the
startRecording()
and
stopRecording()
methods. They wanted to make design changes to the sign-up flow and wanted a
more straightforward camera library that would give them more design
flexibility.
Results
Introducing CameraX enabled Monzo to simplify their code, making it more maintainable, and has helped simplify development. The move to CameraX has greatly reduced crashes and they are no longer seeing random activations of the camera flash. All of this has contributed to a reduction in the drop-off rate in the sign-up flow and has improved user feedback.
The simplification in code resulting from implementing CameraX reduced almost 9,000 lines of code, including 6,000 lines of UI code. In addition to making the code easier to maintain and simplifying development, CameraX also led to better code coverage in unit tests.
Importantly, the impact on the sign-up flow was significant. With the introduction of CameraX and the simplified flow design changes, the dropout rate from identification image capture and selfie video recording dropped from 25% to around 5%.
“For us, CameraX was all about stability and having an easy integration experience for our developers. It was the perfect library for us—we just wanted a simple way to take pictures and videos. CameraX has given us that, plus our code is simpler and the user experience better.” Anastasios Morfopoulos—Android developer, Monzo
Get started
Check out the CameraX documentation to learn how to introduce more robust and simplified image capture code to your app or game.