Teller allows developers to build applications on top of their users' bank accounts, not just your own. Read more about TAuth and how it works here: https://blog.teller.io/2016/04/26/tauth.html
Stevie summed it up well I just want to add as a paying user of Plaid and a beta user of Teller, they aren't even in the same league. Teller is a by far better product and developer experience.
Plaid's data is also stale, overpriced, poorly documented and often doesn't work as advertised for many banks listed as supported. Their platform has serious billing issues and documentation inconsistencies all of which we have raised with them.
if you research the history of famo.us that was the app they were originally funded to build, and took a ton of hacks and workarounds to achieve good HTML5 perf. Thats when they realised the opportunity for a famo.us-like framework was necessary.
I was a huge fan of famo.us until just now. Testing in iPhone4S, most of these apps are super jittery (never continuously 60fps) and unresponsive to touch in the browser, especially Yahoo Weather, which looks to be the only one complex enough to resemble a full app.
At best, this is a very impressive "mobile web app" framework NOT a native replacement. I would never trade up obj-c for cordoba/js if this is the kind of inconsistent performance users will have to deal with... and btw I love javascript.
I think steve is a phenomenal entrepreneur but may have built this launch up way too much. Without their native wrapper and MVC this feels like it's going to be a few years before it can rival native development.
Some of the UX interactions here are brilliant, switching tabs fades the music in and out, swipe to control video playback, transition animations are sweet
checkout Monster.js, there is an example there. Basically all your queries should be methods on the collections/models. Each data model is defined in their own file extending the ExternalDataServices service. No need to create a new service for every model.
This is the most common feedback we've had so we'll improve the docs in time.