The debate about mobile versus desktop misses the point. They're not competing for the same job.
This is not an argument against mobile apps. I use them constantly. But there's a difference between checking something and doing something, and most apps are designed as if those two activities are the same.
What mobile is actually good at
Your phone is with you everywhere. That's genuinely useful. When I'm in the supermarket and I can't remember whether I've already bought olive oil, I check the reminders app. When I'm at the car park machine and I can't remember my car registration, I check my records. When I'm queuing somewhere and I want to know where I stand with my spending this month, I open Monzo.
Mobile is fast. It's contextual. It answers the question "what is happening right now?" better than anything else.
The problem is when apps treat "showing you information" as the end goal, rather than the beginning of one.
The fragmented context problem
Open Monzo and you'll see your transactions. That's the feature, and it's a good one. But what you're looking at is a list of events without a story. The £43 to Halfords looks like an anomaly until you remember it was for windscreen wipers. The £180 on a Friday looks alarming until you remember it was the restaurant bill. The coffee shop charge that hits three times a week is easy to overlook when you're scrolling through a feed.
Mobile apps show you what happened.
Desktop helps you understand what it means and decide what to do next.
Mobile apps are not built to show you what it means, because that requires context that doesn't fit on a phone screen. It requires knowing your budget, your goals, your recurring patterns, your upcoming commitments. That kind of joined-up view doesn't compress well to a small phone display.
When I reconcile my spending in LifeAxis, I'll often have Monzo open on my phone at the same time. Not because LifeAxis doesn't have transaction data — it does — but because Monzo shows the raw merchant names, the exact times, the card details. It's the source of truth for what actually left my account. LifeAxis is where I make sense of it. Two tools, two jobs, used together.
That's not a failure of either app. That's them both doing what they're actually good at.
Why most apps get this wrong
The industry defaulted to mobile-first a decade ago, and the instinct made sense then. Smartphones were the new behaviour. Meeting people where they were meant building for the phone.
The problem is that mobile-first became the design priority, and it stuck. When you design for a small screen first, you strip out complexity to make it fit. You simplify navigation. You reduce the information density. You make it easy to glance at. Then the desktop version ships and it's just the mobile version stretched wider, because that's what the product team built first and knows best.
The result is that most financial apps have mediocre desktop experiences. Not because desktop is hard to build — it's often easier — but because the team's mental model was always the phone. The desktop is an afterthought that never quite catches up.
For tools that are primarily about context and action — life admin, financial planning, anything that requires holding multiple things in mind at once — that priority order is backwards.
What about PWAs?
This is one of the reasons we chose to build LifeAxis as a Progressive Web App.
What matters is that the same product works well on both desktop and mobile, without forcing one experience to compromise for the other.
On desktop, LifeAxis gives you the space to review finances, compare information, plan ahead and make decisions. You can see multiple things at once and build the context that's often missing from the specialist apps we use every day.
On mobile, it becomes a companion. You can check what's due, look up information, record something quickly, or get a reminder when you're out and about. The information is always with you, but you're not trying to squeeze a desktop workflow onto a small screen.
The phone is where life happens. The desktop is where life gets organised.
The goal isn't to make desktop behave like a phone, or a phone behave like a desktop. It's to make sure each device is used for what it's actually good at.
Two screens, one picture
I think the most honest version of modern personal finance looks like this: your specialist apps — your bank, your broker, your insurer — live on your phone because they're fast, contextual, and designed for quick reference. Your life admin platform lives on your desktop, because that's where you have the screen space, the time, and the headspace to actually think.
They're not competitors. They're different tools in the same workflow. The phone is the window. The desktop is where you decide what to do with the view.
The problem isn't that your information lives in different apps. It's that your life doesn't exist in any of them.
Dave is the founder of LifeAxis. Join the beta at lifeaxis.co.uk.