A payment app that works when the connection does not

There is a particular failure that teaches customers a service is broken, and it is not an error message. It is a white screen.

The application’s JavaScript did not finish downloading. Nothing rendered. There is nothing to read, nothing to tap and nothing to explain what went wrong.

Why it happens so often here

A modern web application is a few megabytes of JavaScript that must arrive before anything appears on screen.

On a good connection this is invisible. On a congested cell at five in the afternoon, on a bundle that has nearly run out, on a phone three generations old, it is a white screen for twenty seconds followed by a customer who has given up.

Optimisation helps. It does not help below a certain floor, and a meaningful number of people are below that floor every single day.

Rendered where the computer is

Lite is the same account, rendered on the server and delivered as plain HTML.

No JavaScript. Not degrades gracefully without JavaScript — none at all. Ordinary links. Ordinary forms. The web as it worked before it needed a build step.

A page arrives in kilobytes and renders the instant it lands. There is no bundle to wait for, because there is no bundle.

Not a lesser product

It reaches the same accounts, the same ledger, the same balances. The same sign-in, the same PIN, the same limits, the same server-side checks.

Nothing about the security of the full app lives in its JavaScript. If it did, that would be a defect in the full app rather than a reason to distrust Lite.

Old browsers

Cheap phones ship with browsers that are already years behind, and they do not get updated. A framework that needs a current browser has excluded those customers as surely as if it had asked for a passport.

Server-rendered HTML works in all of them, because it is the thing browsers have always done.

The data argument

On a metered bundle, the difference between kilobytes and megabytes is not an engineering nicety. It is whether checking your balance costs you something you were saving for something else.

When to use it

Keep the full app for ordinary days. Open Lite when the network is having one of those afternoons, when the bundle is nearly gone, or when you are using a phone that is not yours.

It is the one that works when the other one does not.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• Lite is server-rendered and requires no JavaScript at all — not a degraded fallback, a working surface.
• It reaches the same accounts and the same ledger as the full app.
• Pages are small enough to arrive on a congested connection where a single-page bundle would not.
• It works in browsers too old for a modern application framework.

What it costs

Free, and it uses markedly less data than the full app — which on a metered connection is the point.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: BitriPay Lite on the features page.

Read next

• USSD and SMS — No smartphone. No data. Same account.
• Offline payments — Trade when the network is gone.
• Alerts you cannot miss — If there was no sound, there was no money.