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

coutts.com

231–240 of 312 posts

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

#231
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the sort of bank where you can just show up with 1m and the staff will bend over backwards to open your account. 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.

It just made the headlines for the wrong reason…

“The headlines” typically refer to coverage in a mainstream publication, not a post on HN.

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

#232
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s crazy for any company to want more than 3 months to support a new OS. 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.

Out of ignorance I ask: 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 mat…

> LTS versions of iOS

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.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s quite a jump there. One bank is bad at maintaining their app all the way to a blanket statement about rich people and technology.

I'd definitely have gone to banks are terrible at IT rather than rich people. 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…

Ironically the PHP blog site may have gotten a lot more engineering TLC than the bank’s IT system.

Not necessarily more hours or $$ spent on it, but more care.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s quite a jump there. One bank is bad at maintaining their app all the way to a blanket statement about rich people and technology.

I'd definitely have gone to banks are terrible at IT rather than rich people. 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…

> We are upgrading our web site so it won't be available until Tuesday

I envy this sometimes. It takes a lot more work to evolve a system with zero downtime.

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh really? Three whole months? Shame on them /s

Why the /s? Three months is a _very_ long time in software. This isn’t retooling physical metal for a new car model year; it’s minor software tweaks at best. Most developers don’t actually need to do anything.

> Three months is a _very_ long time in software

No, its not. For example, I use an open source app called fd:

https://github.com/sharkdp/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.

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

#236
post #184

I’m aware of at least one large law firm telling its employees the same thing.

It shouldn’t be necessary for an employer to “tell” its employees to defer iOS updates. For iOS updates, employers can defer OS updates via MDM by up to 90 days. https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/manage-software-u...

BYOD is very common these days, MDM can only defer updates if it's a managed device. Most people don't want to carry two devices and most companies would like to save the cost...

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

#237
post #28

The EU bank market is weird. 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 com…

Coutts is of course not an EU bank any more. Sigh.

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

#238
post #60

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 u…

I was joking the other day that the Apple Watch is the ultimate equalizer. The CEO, worth a billion dollars, and the janitor at our company are rocking the same Apple watch

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

#239

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…

> This is one of the most exclusive banks in the world 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 furth…

> If you want truly exclusive, you have to cross the road and walk a bit further down the Strand to Fleet Street.

So if you can’t “buy your way in” to these banks, what are the criteria?

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

#240

As one who works on the iOS app for a major US financial company, my guess would be they included some “security” tool/SDK that is having problems getting upgraded to iOS16.

I think this relates to management mentality when management are engineers.

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

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