Simpl: Fixing In-App Browser Payment Failures No One Else Pursued

During his first weeks at Simpl, Abhishek was working through the codebase and reviewing logs when he noticed unusually low success rates on one of the platform's payment methods. His senior told him it was a known issue, a consequence of browser compatibility limitations in in-app browsers, and that it had always been that way.

Abhishek's instinct was to dig rather than accept the explanation. He went deeper into the logs, into Sentry, and through the observability tooling the team had in place. He found a fix that the team had not pursued, a workaround that could handle the constraints of in-app browsers without requiring a full rewrite of the payment flow.

Making the Case to Ship It

Rather than escalating immediately, he built the solution overnight and then brought it to his engineering manager and product manager with a clear framing: the engineering cost was effectively zero because he was still onboarding and had capacity. He made the case that the fix was worth shipping, got the necessary stakeholders aligned, and worked with the team to get a proper UX design in place before release.

The problem he was solving was specific to in-app browsers inside apps like Instagram, Facebook, and Slack, which do not fully adhere to web browser standards. Simpl's users frequently opened payment flows inside these environments, and the drop-off rate there was significant. His fix gave those users a path to complete their payment without requiring the platform to rebuild its entire payment stack for each browser variant.