Back in January, the T-Mobile Tuesdays app was overhauled into the T-Life app. T-Mobile made a big show about how it’s all new and easy to use, and centered a lot of their advertising around T-Life, including the “Magenta Status” branding.
Weirdly, however, the base T-Mobile app has recently been updated to an all-new design and… well it’s basically identical to the T-Life app.
There is one small difference, though. The new T-Mobile app includes a “What’s New” video that doesn’t appear to be present in the T-Life app. We were able to pull the video from the app and it’s embedded below.
The video shows all the features of the new app, which again are identical to the T-Life app. Customers can pay their bill, shop for new devices and add lines, manage their Home Internet gateway (if they have one), and browse and redeem T-Mobile Tuesdays perks all from the same app.
Both apps also allow the setup of a 3-month eSIM trial of T-Mobile service, if eligible.
Interestingly, the video file itself, which seems to only show in the T-Mobile app and not the T-Life app, has an original filename that includes “T-Life”, as well as a date of July 26th. (Our copy of the video above has a different filename). This suggests the video was designed for deployment on the T-Mobile app along with it’s redesign, but was also made for T-Life. The video even includes the recent pickleball set freebie.
There’s a huge downside to the new app though. There no longer appears to be any way to initiate a support chat directly in the app for most customers.
Customers previously had multiple ways to contact support. T-Force, the social media support team, can be reached via DMs on both Twitter and Facebook. Then there’s always a standard phone call to the support number. Finally, a support chat was available in the app. The latter now appears to be missing in the new app for most users.
Some users on iOS devices see an icon to initiate chat in the app, however other iOS users do not. So far no Android users have the option either.
Hopefully the issue is a bug, and will be fixed soon. If it is, the app probably should’ve never made it out the door.
Regardless, we here at The Mobile Report recommend using T-Force, as they tend to have the highest success rate. Your mileage may vary.
So what’s going on here? Only T-Mobile knows. The company might continue to allow both apps to exist simultaneously on the app stores, and customers can use whichever they happen to have on their device. They might also eventually remove one or the other.
Either way, it seems quite odd to make an entire marketing plan around the name “T-Life” when you’re going to just update the “T-Mobile” app to be the same thing anyway. Only time will tell.
The new T-Mobile app is available now on both iOS and Android devices.
