ANZ goMoney app hits Android

Australia's first mobile banking app, ANZ goMoney, is finally making the transition to the Android OS, ending two years of exclusivity with Apple.

The ANZ goMoney application originally launched on Apple's iOS platform in mid-2010. The app has undergone several major updates but has only been available on Apple devices.

ANZ's competitors -- including CommBank and Westpac -- have since introduced mobile banking apps for iOS and Android. NAB has introduced apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Tim Bradley, Senior Manager of Mobile Banking at ANZ, said a lot of time and effort had gone into building an Android version of the app, with device fragmentation and security proving to be significant challenges.

Rather than porting across the iPhone app, ANZ built the Android version "from the ground up", he said.

"Before moving onto Android we needed to invest heavily within our security layers," Bradley told iTnews.

"There are a lot of hardware manufacturers with handsets available on the Android platform, so we didn't want to rush anything to market."

Bradley acknowledged that some features were currently missing from the Android version of the app, including account forwarding/ordering and the ability to 'nickname' an account.

"Release 1 is similar to the first iPhone version, which also didn't come with those features," Bradley said. "But we should be adding them in the next iteration of the app."

Bradley was unable to confirm whether ANZ was working on a Windows Phone version of the app but said the bank was looking at different channels.

"It's probably too early to commit to anything, but as things evolve, we'll evolve with them," he said.

ANZ's goMoney app was used to make almost five million transactions in August 2012 by more than 700,000 users, the bank said.

According to analyst firm IDC, Android devices commanded 68.1 percent market share, Apple's iOS 16.9 percent, and Blackberry 4.8 percent last quarter -- the latter down from 11.5 percent in 2011.

Windows Phone and Windows Mobile devices accounted for 3.5 percent of smartphones last quarter, up from 2.3 percent the previous year.