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Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

coutts.com

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Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#51

Post by api »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #10

This is one of the most exclusive banks in the world, counting the British Royal Family among their notable clients, and they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date. Pretty much sums up what rich people think about technology: make it sexy and powerful but I don't want to hear about ongoing maintenance costs. According to Wikipedia, new clients needed £500k in disposable funds to set up an account…

I'm sure the consultants they pay to maintain the app cost more to churn out just one version than the entire budget of most mobile app startup companies for the first three years.

Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#52

Post by thro388 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #10

This is one of the most exclusive banks in the world, counting the British Royal Family among their notable clients, and they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date. Pretty much sums up what rich people think about technology: make it sexy and powerful but I don't want to hear about ongoing maintenance costs. According to Wikipedia, new clients needed £500k in disposable funds to set up an account…

> they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date 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.

This is so true. Try to bank in Switzerland, it is so 1980ties...

Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#53

Post by gregoriol »

YPPH wrote: post #2

If only there were some program whereby app developers could preview the new iOS version so as to ensure compatibility. /s

So it seems that you have never worked in a real company, where it can't easily be done to make a major technical rework of some components in a 3 months timeframe. With debugging, conception of a fix, implementation and testing, it is not often possible.

Teams are also not standing by to be available anytime for such works, often those apps are being worked on with contractors.

Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#54

Post by ToddWBurgess »

To be fair maybe the app is done but not rejected by the Apple review process so there is some back and forth getting the app to pass. A lot of app politics to navigate for both Apple and Google to get your app out and published.

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.

Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#55

Post by silon42 »

jrm4 wrote: post #11

Regulation. 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.)

No, the bank apps need to have a web alternative.

The browsers need improvements (and not getting worse) on handling TSL + client side certificates.

Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#56

Post by [deleted] »

thro388 wrote: post #52
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can't even be bothered to keep their mobile app up to date 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.

This is so true. Try to bank in Switzerland, it is so 1980ties...

[deleted]

Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#57

Post by sfvegandude »

gregoriol wrote: post #50

While it's not clear what the exact problem is in this case, the Triumph motorcycle company seems also to have issued a message about not updating iOS because of a bluetooth connectivity issue with it ( https://superbike-news.co.uk/triumph-motorcycles-ios16-updat... ). 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 ar…

Why does a motorcycle need an app

Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#58

Post by scrlk »

I'm surprised that they seem to be using a custom app just for Coutts and not a rebranded NatWest app (Coutts is the HNW division inside the NatWest Group).

FWIW Royal Bank of Scotland (another brand inside the NatWest Group) shares the same app as NatWest.

Re: Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

#60

Post by jl6 »

What I find really amazing is that we have here an incredibly elite service that the vast majority of people will never be able to afford, and yet its elite clients are dependent on essentially the same mobile devices that everyone else is. You can spend ~$2k on a phone, and it will be the best phone you can buy. There's no $20k phone that will be any better.

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.

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