USAA arises from the dead!

Because my parents were both Reserve officers, I’ve had USAA auto insurance all my life. They have been good and fair to me, regardless of the at-fault driver.

When I had my WP7 Surround, I was happy when Mobility Digest reported that USAA had joined the (then recent) run of banking apps to come to the platform. Now, my memory isn’t the best, but I don’t recall using it much, because I believe it was just the banking services and not the Property & Casualty Insurances, so it was not very useful to my needs.

For some reason, I kept the app on my Lumia 920 even after the app was pulled from the Store earlier this year. So I was rather surprised yesterday when I saw tweets about an update. I checked my phone after I got home and there it was, so I let it update and then checked it out.

The design is nice and clean and Metro Modern. HOWEVER, and this will make a difference to some purists, aside from the menus, the app seems to be simply a wrapper for usaa.com (note the test in the upper left corner of the picture below). That being said, I was ALMOST about to say it was still clean, attractive, and worked well.

What happened? Well, as I was writing the above paragraph, I went into the app to look at a few things, and I saw something I’d never noticed: “Home Value Monitoring.” Cool, I thought, let’s check this out. So I clicked through, the app populated my address from my account information, I clicked “Submit” and waited to see what happened. After a few seconds I got this page:

Click through to see larger pictures.

BUT THE PAGE WILL NOT SWIPE TO THE RIGHT. All that info there? I CANNOT SEE IT. It looks like there’s a map of nearby recent sales and a table of comparables. If I were really interested in selling my house, I want that information, but I can’t get it on the phone. I’d have to go to the regular, full website. I don’t have a problem with that, but if you’re going to include something in the app, it needs to be accessible

I don’t have a problem with an app being a wrapper, but if you’re going to display anything, please make sure that the items display properly! Don’t get me wrong, this update is a Very Good Start, and is very welcome by the Windows Phone using USAA membership, but it looks like there’s still a little work to be done.

Post Script: This *was* originally going to be a glowing review, until I hit the snag with the Home Value Monitoring section. I like to give my feedback to those I talk about, and I posted the article link to USAA’s Facebook page. A couple of hours later, I got a reply saying they’d pass it on to the mobile team. So thanks to USAA for the app, and let’s support the mobile team and hope they can format the data better, or find some other solution quickly!