Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16
coutts.com
coutts.com
Not sure why downvoted. Many private banks have $1 to 10mm minimums.
OP’s point still stands. That’s middle of ground for a private bank. Far from “most exclusive.”
For instance, if the Royal family banks there it means they think the bank will never ever make headlines for the wrong reasons or at all.
Anyone will take your cash if there’s enough of it.
It was just a lot more personal service than any large bank could ever offer.
I imagine this is exactly the same, just on a bigger scale.
My brother did the same thing when he started his businesses, and I've moved to it over time. It's hard to beat talking to a banker who understands what you're doing and is actually there to help you.
Think William Reece-Mogg, not Dick van Dyke.
FYI not sure about other countries, but Americans don't know who the fuck that is.
Even more ironic is that My Fair Lady is an American film based on a play by an Irish Brit (George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion).
Perhaps there truly is no such thing as proper English.
No clue about Coutt’s. But for a top-tier private bank, you have someone you can contact 24/7 (if not them personally, someone you know on their team) to help you. You can effortlessly escalate to the bank’s senior leadership when problems arise.
As a result, having cash overnighted in the event of a lost wallet, cabs paid for over the phone on the firm’s account, or international wires processed instantly and without fees happen. (Also, Formula 1 tickets and access to the firm’s Parterre box at the Met, as well as, for the up and coming, introductions to the bank’s other clients.)
Service= a dedicated banker with whom you can call directly with issues/problems
Flexibility= Custom solutions / humans in the loop decisions. E.g. I know someone who was able to procure a 90 day bridge loan implying dizzying leverage as he was buying a business and buying + selling a primary residence because he was able to sit down with someone, walk through the merits with a human underwriter.
Advice= Conduit of multitudes of expert opinions around insurance, tax, estate planning etc.
Guessing their clients aren’t banking via mobile apps, their staff having lines to their banker. Most top-tier private banks barely have an online presence. If you want something, you (or your assistant) calls or texts your banker.
Edit: 5 downvotes, tough crowd
What do you mean by that? In a way it's not retro enough (for me?), I currently have an account that can only be accessed via a mobile app (e.g. no website). See for instance https://www.neon-free.ch/en/
You can open an account fully online from your home, I don't think you even have to mail anything.
Opening an account with Neon is the simplest thing ever.
I'm still on the phone weekly with CS to even attempt to make them do anything I've ordered them to.
Three weeks ago, they sent me a letter to confirm that my email address was authorized to make orders. I sent that back with the enclosed envelope. 4 days later, they called me to confirm my order. I did (verbally). They called back 10min later to confirm again. I confirmed again.
It has been two weeks since that phone call and the transfer has still not been completed.
Neo banks are more modern and convenient but only compared to traditional banks within CH: spotty online bills support, no twint (or prepay twint), money transfers only occur once a day at 10am on banking days, customer service open from 9 to 5… Banks in CH are hilariously bad (and expensive), and it’s a shock because you always have this image that Switzerland banks must be amazing. Nope, far from it.
For the rest I guess it's things I don't personally care about, so while it could be better (I have a EUR account for which my recipients get transfers within hours), I don't really notice it in practice.
Look, I'm a data engineer by day, I understand how bad UIs happen. I use Airflow, for God's sake, and heavily customized Airflow at that (where we've honestly only kind of roughly kept pace with the UI quality. like I said, I get how bad UIs happen).
But seriously. I try to be charitable. I can understand how page flows might be janky, how you might need a few redirects as they pass you through decades of legacy systems, etc.
But by God, there are some pages where I seriously cannot figure how they made that specific page, alone, in isolation so bad. The only thing I can come up with is they either a) contracted it out to someone who is literally not as capable as someone 2 years into a CS degree, or they've split the page among multiple teams who all wrote little scraps of HTML and JS and then some poor soul had to weld them all together and that's how it ended up.
Is it really just that they all hire huge incompetent contractors who "nobody ever got fired for hiring etc etc" and then they invariably fuck it up? I don't get how that doesn't get disrupted by either SaaS or just someone making a contracting shop that actually finishes projects correctly.
Oh sweet summer child. You have not known the sharp pain of regulatory constraints, split stakeholder constraints, legacy enterprise constraints, COVID constraints. You know not of capacity planning, SOC2, or international banking law.
You have not known the one million lines of code repositories (PLURAL).
You do not see behind the summer rain. To the endless blizzard of business logic behind the frontend. To the third party vendors, evil so vast if it were written down the generations beyond could never forgive.
I envy you greatly.
I've exclusively worked in highly regulated industries - first a registered broker dealer where one of my (less favored) hats I wore was working directly with the SEC and FINRA handling inquiries, and the second being a large fintech company I don't want to be too specific about that dealt with a lot of banking and money movement regulations.
I'd appreciate it if you'd point your condescending prose elsewhere. I stand by my point. There's no reason some of the banking sites I've had to use should be so bad given their funding. If an ungraduated CS student can make their website not break chrome's credit card autocompletion, why can't enormous banks?
Wonder why a transaction was denied? Shoot an email with a screenshot. Want 500$ of Moroccan Dirhams for your next trip? Shoot a text and they'll put together a package + a few sweets for you to pick up when you stop by.
In the face of Apple's app store bullshit, I completely understand. Apple regularly shit the bed in getting apps updated. Frankly the wheels have come off their 'premium' branding a while back.
If they wanted an app-based fintech they could have instantly opened an account with the many available companies in the field, and maybe they also have, but obviously that is not what Coutts is about.
Also, rich people are much more familiar with ongoing asset maintenance costs than the average person, having more assets to maintain.
Coutts probably doesn’t interact with its clients primarily through the app. I bet it’s mostly direct calls/texts between bankers and clients.
/s
Maybe it's more than just one tiny group of people who are prone to such things as hypocrisy.
The royal family gets some of it in their personal coffers, and it's a nontrivial sum, but it wouldn't fix the UK's financial problems all in one swoop to take it. And it would come at a cost of a significant amount of prestige and tourism dollars. It might be a net gain, but most people in the UK feel that it wouldn't be worth the cost to their nation identity.
Many in the UK want the opposite of nationalization. They want to sell off major government properties to private owners, and let capitalism do the work. This isn't quite a majority opinion but it has strong support (and bitter opposition).
I think it’s not just the literal king, but also all the other remaining royalty.
Perhaps privatization is a better path than nationalization. It just seems quite unjust to have literal hereditary land that cannot be transferred.
Just seems like a flamewar comment that doesn't actually explain itself. If the whole rich vs. poor thing resonates with me on some deep ideological level, I can go ahead and pretend I understand what this all means. Maybe I can even respond with a supportive comment about something something Reagan Republicans.
They are not paying assistants and accountants so they can do mundane tasks like login to a banking site and pay a bill.
Edit: thst -> this. Mobile autocorrects the wrong "correction"
and no one said they have 'exclusive accountants'. There are accounting services where you pay them for a few days work and they take care of all your bills for you.
I've only met one multi-billionaire in my life and can assure you that he has never seen his bills, let alone pay them.
He doesnt even own a smart phone, because he has assistants who handle most of that for him allowing him to focus on one thing - making money.
Please keep in mind I’m not talking about living in poverty, I’m talking about having all your monetary needs met to live your lifestyle (without being forced to work), without having a huge excess left over.
Out of curiosity (not debating, but rather conversating) -- what portion of humanity is in this enviable condition?
It's probably somewhere <5%, maybe <1%, right now (I would include current successful retirees).
Their quality and approaches are highly varied, but the one billionaire you know probably uses one, as the "never pay bills and no smart phone" is fairly indicative of a family office behind the scenes.
But all the rich people I know are in tech or banking/investing, and made, not inherited, their money.
As an aside, my guess is that average tax rate for the techies is 40% but probably <30% for the bankers.
I remember the “we only need to support Internet Explorer” days. Testing on Chrome and Firefox wasn’t important.
My bank (First Republic) caters to richer people, and has had shitty website features in the past. It’s all outsourced to Intuit, I think. But overall it’s a great bank. I care a lot about technology but don’t make all life decisions based on it. One I did make is refuse to buy a car in 2017 (Mini Cooper) that didn’t have CarPlay (I bought a GTI instead).
People love to be marketed to and sold the promises of amazing technology that can do extraordinary things, but nobody wants to pay for it. And if you're a company that wants a mobile app as part of your business, then you need to understand that you gotta pay to maintain it. There's no excuse for a bank like this to skip out on app maintenance. If the wealthiest among us can't understand this, what does it say about our decision to transition towards a more technology-reliant society?
>>>This is one of the most exclusive banks in the world ... and they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date.
One bank is bad at maintaining their app all the way to a blanket statement about rich people and technology.
I am not a rich person, although I'm comfortable, but several of my banks are terrible at IT. Like "We are upgrading our web site so it won't be available until Tuesday" level bad at IT.
Note that wasn't just "Some services won't be available", the whole web site was out of action for most of a day. It's disappointing but understandable if I can't send a random stranger 2500 ¥ at 2am because the bank are upgrading something. But it's straight up crazy that I can't even see my 2018 bank statement PDF because they're upgrading, it's the sort of feature a PHP Blog site can make work.
Not necessarily more hours or $$ spent on it, but more care.
I envy this sometimes. It takes a lot more work to evolve a system with zero downtime.
Maybe every other bank is better? I doubt it. For me one bank being unavailable is a mild inconvenience (it so happened I wanted to use Santander to check some records, but most days I wouldn't have noticed) but most people only have one bank, so it being out of action is really problematic, and we live in an era when "you could visit a physical branch" might as well be "You could fly to the moon" for all the practical good it does normal customers.
The IT Crowd TV series are representative.
Not particularly exclusive, bought by NatWest in 2000 and then taken over by Ernst & Cie. So its little more than a brand-name these days, you can effectively buy your way in.
If you want truly exclusive, you have to cross the road and walk a bit further down the Strand to Fleet Street.
Regarding Private Banks and the online world, yes they tend to be a bit further behind the bleeding edge. But then if one can call up one's relationship manager who recognises one by voice without the need for tiresome security questions, then one might understand why expenditure on one's bank's online services is a secondary priority.
So if you can’t “buy your way in” to these banks, what are the criteria?
First you will need to be "introduced" to the bank by an existing customer. We're not talking about a referral link here, we're saying who introduces you is just as important as who is being introduced (i.e. long-standing customer vouching for an introduction gets more weight than a newbie trying to get a mate in).
Second, if the introduction is acceptable, then you will be invited to a meeting with one or more members of the bank's senior management to determine if you are a good fit (and no, "good fit" does not equal a commercial fit about determining how much they can sell you, its a "good fit" as in determining that you have your head screwed on and won't cause the bank problems).
You might think this is excessive, but at the most exclusive bank the management have genuine skin in the game (e.g. bank is purposely setup as unlimited liability legal structure, so if management were to ever fuck up, they really would FUCK UP because they have no corporate veil to hide behind).
It also means that dodgy overseas money and the nouveau riche can't buy their way in and start causing problems. A truly exclusive bank values quality of client over quantity of clients.
C. Hoare & Co. [1]
Their unlimited liability and the reasoning behind it is briefly discussed in a blog post by one of their senior partners[2].
[1] https://www.hoaresbank.co.uk/ [2] https://www.hoaresbank.co.uk/The_Special_Dynamics_of_a_Famil...
> 'Mr Babbington,' he said, suddenly stopping in his up and down. 'Take your hands out of your pockets. When did you last write home?' Mr Babbington was at an age when almost any question evokes a guilty response, and this was, in fact, a valid accusation. He reddened, and said, 'I don't know, sir.' 'Think, sir, think,' said Jack, his good-tempered face clouding unexpectedly...'Never mind. Write a handsome letter. Two pages at least. And send it in to me with your daily workings tomorrow. Give your father my compliments and tell him my bankers are Hoares.' For Jack, like most other captains, managed the youngsters' parental allowance for them. 'Hoares,' he repeated absently once or twice, 'my bankers are Hoares,' and a strangled ugly crowing noise made him turn. Young Ricketts was clinging to the fall of the main burton-tackle in an attempt to control himself, but without much success.
One take I've heard on that, whether or not its true I don't know, is that it is a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of the very early generation of Hoares, one of whom earnt himself the nickname "naughty" (Richard "Naughty" Hoare).
Allegedly he was no stranger to, shall we say, a particularly extravagant lifestyle.
Why would they want to do that?
To show the customer they're putting their money where their mouth is, i.e. that they are genuinely more interested in the long-term relationship than the pure commercial profitability of the client.
Going for unlimited liability also focuses the mind of the bank's management. You can't make short-sighted decisions just because you want to boost your bonus. You have to genuinely make sound decisions with the bank and the bank's customer's in mind.
Its very rare these days. Rarer than pure partnership legal structure which is already very rare. Almost all organisations these days opt to take the easier route and hide behind the corporate veil.
It's like flying in first class and then having to queue up in the same immigration line as everybody else - except in that scenario you can pay your way into a priority lane.
True, ~$2k is still a lot for a phone, but it's within reach of so many more people than the gatekept world of private banking and jets.
This is not a comment about wealth disparity - it's about goods which seem to resist the impact of wealth disparity; where there is a relatively low upper bound on how good of a thing you can buy.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1959/02/14/the-universal-...
These days guess it's more rebadget iphones like the ones sold by caviar.
https://www.vertu.com/collections/aster-p
The gullwing titanium SIM card slots are straight out of Silicon Valley. There's even a Gavin Belson-worthy signature!
https://www.vertu.com/products/aster-p-ti-black-rococo-himal...
And tying neatly back to the original article, it seems these things are running a 2017-vintage fork of Android 8.1 called "Luxury OS".
You don’t get any actual advantage from them , it is all cosmetic. Your flagship $1500 phone which is within the reach of the many people has the same or better specs than that.
“The main trade that was carried out was in the skins of the NowWhattian boghog but it wasn’t a very successful one because no one in their right minds would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds.”
- Douglas Adams in Mostly Harmless.
Edit: they still have those too https://www.vertu.com/products/signature-v-black-gold-diamon...
Index funds and low fees is the best way, and that's available to everyone. In fact the more expensive services are worse precisely because they're more expensive, and so underperform against passive index funds.
(I generalize of course.)
Is this what some of Blackberry phones would have been if they continued their earlier legacy and designed phone lineups that appeal to reach people (hardened device, durable, privacy, "non-trackable", can connect to any cellular network and satellite internet.. etc)?
Vertu emerged from Nokia when they were at their peak - Frank Nuovo was the key designer there, and it was one of his projects.
From memory the original versions (Vertu Signature, Vertu Ascent, … ) used one of the Nokia feature-phone OSs as the base - maybe Series 30 or Series 40? - or they might have used one of the Symbian OS’es (Series 60).
They definitely used a Symbian OS in subsequent Vertu devices, before switching to Android later on.
They were incredibly well made devices, but ridiculous.
Source: I worked at Nokia for a while in a non-engineering role. I spent some time with a Vertu Ascent, and had access to the Vertu stores in Asia.
"What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good"
Apple sent out a notification on Wednesday 17 August warning of two security issues within their operating system, and advised users to update their devices to the latest version to resolve them.
As you've previously accessed your Revolut account from an iOS device, we advise you to follow this recommendation as soon as possible.
You can update your device via Settings > General > Software Update.
I imagine they need to test / get FDA clearance first or something similar, since it's a medical app.
But... people will forget to re-enable the updates afterwards, of course.
The email is send every year, with every update of the OS.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/en/app/minimed-mobile/id1464664725?l=...
This isn't just this bank. This is many. And this is future shock.
No, its not. For example, I use an open source app called fd:
I have not updated it since 2020. Yeah, new versions are available, but the old one works fine, so no need to even upgrade. You shouldn't have to get every single version of software just because its available.
Do you think Apple just releases new versions of iOS with API changes to keep developers shipping new versions or something?
I don't understand this mentality that just because v1.6.3 is available you don't HAVE to upgrade from v1.2.1.
There's obviously new bug fixes and features available to you.
The only reason I would say not to upgrade is because your device doesn't support the new version and in that case you CANT upgrade.
This specific situation is unfortunate, but I’d expect many other companies to have a mildly broken app for a few months. In particular, the punch hole gimmick was kept a secret and I’d expect apps who expected no touch target in that area to have to rethink a bunch of assumptions.
Why aren’t there LTS versions of iOS?
As a long time iOS user each year brings a bit of change with improvements just barely better than regression. Under the hood, what changes so much as to consider it a major upgrade with breaking changes?
The MS pattern of deep support of legacy API for applications seems too extreme in the other direction. However iOS has long sense reached a point of maturity where annual breakage is also an extreme.
I think that would be cool for users that want security and don't want the new features or new design.. But it'll be used as an excuse for certain apps to not keep their up to date with the newest APIs.
As for the company, they often use the OS version to drive more sales. The new OS almost always requires a little bit more performant hardware. The older the phone, the slower it gets with the newer OS.
How does it benefit consumers, developers, or Apple to support older OS’s on phones that can support the newest version?
For example, I wish that they didn’t support OG SE on 15 since there were goose-egg OS level improvements and giant regression in battery with 15.6.
To add to that, phones have no OS downgrade process, so even if as an app provide you decide you won't support the latest OS, every new phone bought from now will still come with it, and the user can't do anything about that.
A LTS would require to also get read of the version up rachetting.
I think that’s a major security issue for the average person.
Companies like this act like their services are special and that customers should bend over backwards to accommodate their own shortcomings.
Are you so sure of this? I have apps that haven't been updated in years that still run on my iPhone 13 Pro Max using latest iOS.
For the past 4-5 releases the worst I’ve seen in the apps I’m responsible are a small number of minor non-breaking quirks… think things like a button rendering slightly oddly. It’s never been beyond what a single dev could handle.
Android on the other hand…
Yeah. Hence why Kotlin is a dead end and React Native is more or less the new standard.
I am asking to learn.
I conjecture that the bank didn’t bother to test the app on a new version of iOS until this week, found a major bug, and knew they couldn’t fix it fast enough.
But they could have tested three months ago when the beta came out, and any major issues (like using an old API) probably would have occurred then.
If I coax a random FOSS Mac app project from the early to mid 2000s into compiling on modern macOS there’s usually deprecation warnings left and right, with many of the deprecations having happened in OS X 10.2-10.6 (well over a decade ago), but it’ll still work fine.
So devs usually have plenty of chance to move things over. The grace period just isn’t indefinite like it is with e.g. Windows — sometimes the deprecated APIs are removed 5-6 releases down the road and so it’s a good idea to move off of them sooner than later.
It's clear that Apple has no respect for developers on their platform.
I see this as Apple breaking the app. Demanding and nudging users to auto-update the iOS, the consequences being the OS fails to run what it previously could run.
Backwards compatibility would mean that MacOS should still have support for 32 bit apps? PPC apps? 68K apps? Should they have ported Carbon to 64 bits? Should they have kept support for QuickDraw from the 80s? QuickDraw GX from the 90s?
Either way, I expect my PC to be capable of running old software including 32 bit apps. My 64bit Windoze machine does that.
> removed chunks of the processor
Did users petition for the chunks to be removed?
It's not like 32/64 bit applications are equivalent to VHS/DVD, where hardware is obviously different. But even then, I own this DVD/VHS combo player: https://www.lg.com/au/dvd-blu-ray-players/lg-RC689D
Your x86 PC that you appreciate being able to run 32 bit apps, also can’t last 20 hours on one charge, the integrated graphics are much slower and it probably sounds like a 747 under load compared to the fanless MacBook Air.
32/64 bit applications are in fact the equivalent of VHS/DVD combo players. Each instruction set is duplicated and shared libraries are duplicated. If you have some 32 bit applications in memory and some 64 bit applications in memory, you have duplicate libraries in memory.
I use a desktop machine primarily, no battery issues, no memory issues. Purrs like a kitten under load. I like pushing 3D graphics and having lots of headroom in general. A MacBook Air won't cut it for my purposes.
I suppose rejecting backwards compatibility is better for business: Competition from older software is no longer a problem.
I still use Photoshop CS6 (2012) because it does what I need. My work laptop has latest Photoshop and while some of the new tools are nice, I don't see 10 years worth of innovation. I see a software company's nagging efforts to enforce cloud dependency, hustle users with sneaky price hikes, and even spam the email addresses of licensee seat holders with "trusted partner" junk.
Photoshop actually is another example of things working as they should. Adobe has ported Photoshop from 68K, to PPC, to OS X, to x86 32 bit, to x86 64 bit, to ARM.
As far as subscriptions, I don’t use Photoshop. But back in the day, one seat of MS Office use to be $600. Now I can get a 5 user license of Office where each user can use Office on any combination of Macs, Windows PCs, iPhones, iPads and the web plus 5TB of cloud storage for $99 a year.
The vast majority of people are using laptops. But even desktop ARM Macs are seeing the same benefits from being able to ditch backwards compatibility.
Because who doesn't want better battery life for their desktop machine? Or quieter fans or more memory.
Desktops have plenty of RAM, enough to not worry about whatever insignificant benefits you're talking about that may arise from ditching backwards compatibility. Which by the way, has never been an undesirable feature. You're just trying to sell it as undesirable by claiming users are in great debt to those who decide to take away the option to run older software.
Apple has stated they will delete iOS apps from app store if they haven't been updated in awhile even if they technically still function. This will lead to a farcical situation of updates for the sake of updates, which is no doubt happening now anyway to get attention. "Remember me? I'm the app you haven't touched in a few months, here's an update!"
You're a subscription apologist and you dislike backwards compatibility. Your position is unconvincing in this discussion, but it sounds like you're happy! All the best.
Maybe their iOS dev left a few months ago and there are large changes needed they haven't been able to pull off in time? Maybe there's a very specific issue/bug they're having trouble to work around? Maybe they actually did make an update but it got rejected in the (in)famous "Apple approval process"? Something else? Who knows...
If this is their first year dealing with an iOS update, they have my sympathies.
If the bank has spent the past 90 days trying and failing to make their app work, they have my sympathies.
If this is not their first year, and they chose not to bother testing their app until the release candidate was issued this week, they do not have my sympathies.
...can anyone guess what about their app might break in iOS 16? I was under the impression that iOS updates didn't generally break compatibility, unless it's locking down some kind of permission. But I'm having a hard time imagining what a banking app would rely on that would change underneath it?
Android isn't much different.
Teams are also not standing by to be available anytime for such works, often those apps are being worked on with contractors.
I feel most people’s opinion in this thread stops at “just don’t be in that situation”
My personal experience is, many mammoth companies are not managing that alright.
Most companies with such kind of app usage won't have a team all year round for their app and will work with contractors on a project basis.
Pretty much all of us who are posting here, even many of the students, have in fact worked at real companies. Perhaps you mean to say that not all of us appreciate that some organizations are a mess and simply cannot design and release a feature in a 3 month timeline even with a year or two of deprecation notice.
It is annoying that Apple breaks existing apps. System updates should keep existing apps working as they are, and only impose changes to those that are rebuilt/updated after the release.
Useful or not, that's for users who will not be able to use it to judge.
They have a pretty long beta program (source: Apple dev., since 1986). If your app doesn't work with the upcoming release, it's not Apple's fault.
Some companies will refuse to start testing, until the OS is officially released. That's a corporate process problem, and not Apple's.
I'm not an Apple apologist, though I am often accused of being so (because I develop Apple apps, that is enough to categorize me as a "fanboi"). It's just that Apple (and many, many other companies) goes well out of their way to accommodate prerelease testing of apps on their operating systems, and many many companies don't bother to avail themselves of the opportunity. I do have a problem with people that consider themselves to be "professionals," having these issues, and blaming the operating system, when the fault is PEBCAK.
I tend not to do very much testing of prerelease, beyond a simple "make sure it doesn't crash" test. I will turn up an issue, from time to time, but it's rare. When I do get an issue, it is often that I rely on a certain order of calls, in delegate protocols, and they can change, with OS releases (the fact I rely on the order is a bug, and this just exposes my bug, so I need to fix it).
This is because I take a very conservative approach to writing apps, use native Swift, but not "bleeding edge," and support one version back. I have deprecation warnings turned on, and all warnings as errors, so I can't compile, if I have stuff that Apple sees will break (usually, the deprecation warnings start a couple of major releases in advance).
I also don't use dependencies, or write, using hybrid systems. That helps a lot.
The people you’re replying to say that an OS shouldn’t break an app unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.
The notice doesn’t say that iOS 16 breaks the app. It’s extremely unlikely that it does, unless they’re using private APIs (bad), or they’ve hardcoded an “iOS 15 or lower” version check (bad).
What the notice does say is “we couldn’t be bothered to test the app with iOS 16, even though it’s been available to developers for months”.
If I gave you a three month warning before punching you in the face, it doesn't make it reasonable for me to punch you in the face.
If you don't want to write apps for a platform, then the solution is simple; don't support it.
Most folks like to support Apple, because it's a really lucrative user base. People make a lot of money from users of Apple devices. People use Apple devices, because they like the assurance they get, of certain things. Most of the folks that complain about Apple are not exactly representative of the huge majority of folks that use Apple devices; who don't have much interest in going out on social media, and making noise about their devices.
If someone gives me a three-month punch warning; I have no one to blame, but myself, if my face is still there, when the punch comes. Whether or not the punch should be thrown, is another matter, and not really relevant (or appropriate) to the discussion.
Its a huge fight every year that never gets resolved
That means they can theoretically make every app run exactly the same on new or old OS, and they could totally have a fuzzer to ensure this.
Sometimes things break when things are updated, especially across major versions. This has been true for the entirety of computing. Microsoft, who have one of the best track records in the industry regarding backwards compatibility, still break countless programs with major Windows updates. Every platform I can think of that isn't an 8-bit system running BASIC has made breaking changes over time. What is your suggested solution?
Do you have any examples of these countless programs broken by updates?
We are going back to a web app for everything. Native is a joke if you care about stability over time. We sign contracts that are 5 years long. That’s 5 major apple/google/etc product cycles. We needed a different strategy for our tiny company.
There’s not really much you can’t do in iOS Safari in 2022. I’ve even got some customers pushing PWAs over Azure Intune to iPads without any problems. No codesign or apple developer program in sight. Life feels much better this way.
I absolutely do not operate day to day from these accounts, they are for doing specialist things and making large movements. Only a very small portion of this banks customers will use them for day to day needs.
Private banking is more like business banking for personal use. Oh and also networking events for people who speak a certain way to meet other people who speak a certain way. /eyeroll
"A smartphone or tablet with a recent version of iOS or Android is required to access our digital service. Read-only access will be provided to users age 11 to 16. Access to our digital service is at our discretion. To activate the service, we’ll need to hold an email address and mobile phone number. Face ID and fingerprint recognition available on selected devices. Payments made to new payees over a certain value will need to be made on the desktop version as an additional layer of security."
More then likely being a bank they probably have a lot of policies and procedures in place to get an app to the point where it is ready to be published and someone just figured out that Apple did an update.
That's all while they are laundering billions of corrupt cash.
Never in my entire life I saw a financial system failing and undermining a fundamental function of the society so much. Seriously, I can't wait for the entire UK banking system to go to hell.
i posted above, but it is crazy people think the ultra-wealthy sit around and pay bills online.
They have assistants and accountants and they are not paying bills the size wealthy people rack up on their phones.
This seems to be equally lazy.
Instead of disabling your updates, you should change your bank. Don't let them get away with it.
Back as early as 2005 there were more than half a dozen ways to represent a “string” in C on Microsoft platforms depending on which API you were using.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/text/how-to-convert-bet...
Of course this led to an early easily exploitable security issue in Windows where all you had to do was encode a DOS command and put in the url for the browser and you could run any DOS command with admin privileges on a web server running IIS.
you take some action, and get "root" access to the OS which allows things like bypassing the anti-theft mechanism?
Do you remember the days when all you had to do was go to a website and now your iphone was "rooted"
Microsoft should have done more to limit "backwards compatibility" as it has stung them over and over again.
Apple has a tendency of intentionally breaking things (sorry, your mac isn't supported on this version of MacOS. Apply a very small patch is suddenly is supported?).
Pretending that Microsofts legacy support created security issues while Apple doesn't have security problems on its own is misleading.
Security fixes should always be backported, because there will always be people stuck at a version of the OS for one reason or the other (it is guaranteed if you serve millions of people).
Blaming users for not upgrading, or forcing developers to upgrade is NOT how it should be done.
Apple does release security fixes and released one for the 2012 circa iPhone 5S last September. But once it dropped support for all 32 bit apps, it didn’t have to carry it forward to new Macs and was able to remove support from the processor itself.
Why stop at software compatibility, why shouldn’t modern MacBooks come with SCSI and ADB ports? Why shouldn’t Apple desktop computers still support Nubus?
They already provide updates for phones and iPads back to 2013 as recently as last month.
That was the first phone that supported LTE. Any phone older than that will soon be inoperable as the carriers shut down their 3G network.
Yes, it's impressive that some old applications can run just fine on a modern Windows box, but it's not really something they've been pushing for long time. If Microsoft had their ideal world, you wouldn't be developing applications for Windows, you'd be building something backed by a series of Azure Services and all your apps would just be light clients talking to an endpoint on Azure.
Scenario: we should upgrade our .Net Framework from 4.6.1 to 4.7.0. and the answer is: why is that necessary? It's a lot of effort and extra cost.
Ok...
Now 4.8.0 comes out... The effort is doubled.
.Net Core 1.. 2.. 3.. and the effort seems impossible, and you'll have to rewrite a lot of your code base.
Now .Net 8 will be released next year, and you're still stuck with the old .Net Framework. This is not to say that every app needs to be updated, but the ones that do will require huge effort.
/rant
Which is unfortunate but doesn't seem super unreasonable.
You only have a few months to find and fix bugs before beta software becomes full release.
And that's only if you found the bug in the beta version to begin with.
FWIW Royal Bank of Scotland (another brand inside the NatWest Group) shares the same app as NatWest.
That said, this reeks of a contractor situation gone bad.
I’m not in the market for this type of bank, but software update reliability is important… As important as things like 2FA maybe not? But this seems like a non-trivial mistake.
where Step 2 is to follow additional steps :D
kinda like drawing an owl
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/572/078/d6d...
Amazing how you can have millions of customers but don't test the Safari betas.
Oh, how kind of you.
IOS 16 improves security and privacy, so is it possible that this famous bank could be doing something dodgy?
Good, old-fashioned, regulation. There's no other meaningful way to prevent this sort of thing. Now that we're dealing with "people's money" there should be energy to push this through.
(And to be clear, it's Apple that needs to be regulated.)
The browsers need improvements (and not getting worse) on handling TSL + client side certificates.
Most comments here don't understand that for some customers, not having to upgrade the mobile OS is a feature, not a bug. You might care about safety etc. These users just don't care - it's another person problem, so they don't want gizmos to enhance "safety" if they are cumbersome.
The intersection of these customers with Coutts typical clients (>500k in liquid funds according to the comments below) may be just as high as the N26 users (let's say, "less privileged") who want the latest mobile OS version and receive OTPs by SMS to protect their precious $100 purchase.
The bank customer will not do this - their personal assistant will.
> the updates are invisible
If only! Tell me you've never deferred an update?
> shifting the burden to their customers.
I don't think you understand the type of bank we're talking about.