Venmo’s First Redesign Since 2009 Means No More Spying on Your Friends’ Payments

Over the years, public Venmo activity has exposed everything from President Joe Biden’s private contacts to spoilers for multiple seasons of “The Bachelor.”

There are only a few places left on the internet where people still accidentally overshare. For more than a decade, Venmo has remained one of them.

The payment app is (in)famous for being a kind of digital people-watching platform, where you can follow along as users publicly document 1 a.m. Taco Bell runs, “drinks” with that one friend and rent payments to someone who is definitely no longer their ex. Over the years, public Venmo activity has exposed everything from President Joe Biden’s private contacts to spoilers for multiple seasons of The Bachelor.

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But a major redesign announced Monday suggests Venmo may be moving away from its oversharing era.

The PayPal-owned payment app unveiled what it describes as its first complete rebuild since launching in 2009, rolling out a redesigned experience centered around personalization, simplified navigation and easier-to-find privacy controls.

The update comes after what Venmo says was a year of customer research, including interviews and usability testing focused on how people prefer to manage and move money. According to the company, users consistently said they wanted the app to feel more modern and useful while still maintaining the features that helped make Venmo popular in the first place.

The overhaul arrives at a time when Venmo is facing much stiffer competition than it did in its early years. Parent company PayPal has increasingly focused on growing Venmo beyond peer-to-peer payments, instead emphasizing user engagement and higher-revenue products like debit cards and “Pay With Venmo” as competition from rivals like Cash App, Zelle and Apple Pay has intensified.

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The social element is not going anywhere.

Instead, Venmo says the redesigned feed will become more curated and personalized, surfacing updates, recommendations and offers based on how people already use the app. Users will also be able to share purchases from favorite brands or local businesses with friends, essentially making the feed feel more recommendation-driven rather than just transactional.

Still, the biggest change may simply be feeling a little less publicly visible every time you split dinner or pay your mom for your part of the family phone bill.

For an app long associated with public-by-default payments — and the occasional accidental overshare — the shift signals a bigger emphasis on user control. According to Venmo, new users will now see privacy-setting options during onboarding and can choose who can view their transactions by default. If users do not select a preference, transaction visibility will default to “between friends,” according to the company. Users will still be able to change those settings later.

The redesigned app will start rolling out gradually in the coming weeks.

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