I finally stopped hating mobile check deposit after 3 years

Last month I was still driving 20 minutes to the branch to deposit a $1,400 check from a freelance job. My bank's app kept failing on me back in 2022, so I just wrote it off as useless. Then the branch teller showed me I was holding the check too close to the camera and the lighting was the issue. I tried it on a Tuesday with natural light from my kitchen window and it went through in about 4 minutes. Now I've done 7 deposits this way and saved maybe 2 hours total. Has anyone else had an app feature they ignored for years that turned out to just need a small tweak?

2 comments

2 Comments

cole_baker1mo ago

...and honestly that whole time I was mad at the app it was really just me being stubborn about reading the instructions. Same thing happened to me with my car's lane keep assist, I thought it was broken for like two years because it kept beeping at me, turns out I had my hands at the wrong spot on the wheel which old people do, so the sensors thought I wasn't holding it. Then my nephew just reached over and touched it at the 10 and 2 position and the beeping stopped instantly. I felt like such a dummy. Anyway your lighting thing makes total sense because my kitchen has that weird yellow ceiling light that makes everything look orange, and my bank app used to reject checks at night all the time. Now I just wait till morning and stand by the patio door and it works every single time, even for those weird greasy receipts that the bank counts as checks. The real trick I learned is to not use your phone case with the magnetic back because that messed with the camera focus on my last phone, that cost me a whole hour at the drive thru lane once.

vera_robinson361mo ago

Wait, the magnetic back messed with your camera focus? That's a thing? I had no idea that could even happen, but it explains so much now that I think about it. My last phone kept blurring anything I tried to scan or photograph up close, and I just blamed the phone being old, never thought about my case. And you had to deal with that in a drive thru lane, that sounds like a nightmare. I would've probably just given up and paid cash or something. So the magnetic case really does mess with the focus that bad, huh? I'm gonna have to test mine now, just to see if that's why my receipts come out all fuzzy when I try to send them to my accountant.