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

This is one of the most exclusive banks in the world, counting the British Royal Family among their notable clients, and they can&#x27;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&#x27;t want to hear about ongoing maintenance costs. According to Wikipedia, new clients needed £500k in disposable funds to set up an account back in 2001.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Coutts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Coutts</a>

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&#x27;s no $20k phone that will be any better.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>True, ~$2k is still a lot for a phone, but it&#x27;s within reach of so many more people than the gatekept world of private banking and jets.<p>This is not a comment about wealth disparity - it&#x27;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.

On the other hand here’s the email I received from Revolut (European neobank similar to cashapp) yesterday:<p>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.<p>As you&#x27;ve previously accessed your Revolut account from an iOS device, we advise you to follow this recommendation as soon as possible.<p>You can update your device via Settings &gt; General &gt; Software Update.

Medtronic sends emails to their customers also, for both iOS and Android it is recommended to disable OS upgrades, as they will not update their Minimed Mobile app yet [1].<p>I imagine they need to test &#x2F; get FDA clearance first or something similar, since it&#x27;s a medical app.<p>But... people will forget to re-enable the updates afterwards, of course.<p>The email is send every year, with every update of the OS.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;app&#x2F;minimed-mobile&#x2F;id1464664725?l=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;app&#x2F;minimed-mobile&#x2F;id1464664725?l=...</a>

Everyone is jumping on the bank for not staying up to date with the frequent and massive chanages that Apple makes. But this is only a news story because it is a bank, this scenario happens constantly to a large fraction of all iOS software. The problem here is that modern libs and standards change so fast (similar to JS) that it really is hard for anyone without a megacorp&#x27;s worth of software dev employees to keep up.<p>This isn&#x27;t just this bank. This is many. And this is future shock.

Separately from the utter ridiculousness of this...<p>...can anyone guess what about their app might break in iOS 16? I was under the impression that iOS updates didn&#x27;t generally break compatibility, unless it&#x27;s locking down some kind of permission. But I&#x27;m having a hard time imagining what a banking app would rely on that would change underneath it?

If only there were some program whereby app developers could preview the new iOS version so as to ensure compatibility. &#x2F;s

While it&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superbike-news.co.uk&#x2F;triumph-motorcycles-ios16-update-advice&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superbike-news.co.uk&#x2F;triumph-motorcycles-ios16-updat...</a>).<p>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&#x2F;updated after the release.

Fun coincidence. We are telling our customers (the banks themselves) the same thing for our B2B product.<p>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&#x2F;google&#x2F;etc product cycles. We needed a different strategy for our tiny company.<p>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.

99% of Coutts and similar customers absolutely will not mind, they&#x27;re not the demographic. And nobody else should either, because they&#x27;re not impacted. Speaking as an ex Coutts customer, until recently they didn&#x27;t even have a mobile banking app. The bank I moved too as a marginally better one, and it&#x27;s one of the reasons why I moved to them.<p>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.<p>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. &#x2F;eyeroll

The disclaimer at the bottom is the icing:<p>&quot;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.&quot;

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.<p>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.

The reviews of this bank on TrustPilot are rather telling.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uk.trustpilot.com&#x2F;review&#x2F;coutts.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uk.trustpilot.com&#x2F;review&#x2F;coutts.com</a>

Fascinating stuff. I do not know so it is a stab in the dark here. Is there a possibility that there is a correlation between this note and clientele not using mobile banking enough to justify an upgrade?

I suspect many of us can tell more about IT horror-stories in the banking industry. There is simply no way to make agile software in such a gigantic and obsolete environment. And yes... doesn&#x27;t matter if you do micro-front architecture now... it is still obsolete.

I once switched banks to get away from their insistence on Internet Explorer, a fake requirement which could be easily bypassed by switching user-agents.<p>This seems to be equally lazy.

Their engineering prowess is also demonstrated by their website’s butter-smooth scrolling performance. &#x2F;s

Their security department must be up in arms. Making sure your software is updated is a pinnacle in security - you simply do not turn of updating of your devices - I know this is a little bit simplistic but it isn&#x27;t as if the BETA hasn&#x27;t been available for iOS 16 for ages.<p>Instead of disabling your updates, you should change your bank. Don&#x27;t let them get away with it.

This is the difference between Microsoft and Apple. Where Microsoft goes through great lengths to keep new versions of OSes compatible with previous ones, Apple just lets users and developers sort it out.

As one who works on the iOS app for a major US financial company, my guess would be they included some “security” tool&#x2F;SDK that is having problems getting upgraded to iOS16.

Title is misleading. Bank tells customers to not update yet until they have a fix out...<p>Which is unfortunate but doesn&#x27;t seem super unreasonable.<p>You only have a few months to find and fix bugs before beta software becomes full release.<p>And that&#x27;s only if you found the bug in the beta version to begin with.

I&#x27;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).<p>FWIW Royal Bank of Scotland (another brand inside the NatWest Group) shares the same app as NatWest.

The Santander app has lost the ability to photograph checks a few times on Android devices I use. It is currently not working on a Pixel 6. It is just an inconvenience but it does not make me confident about security.

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

Get another bank if at all possible

The demographics should not matter, period. The idea that few people use the app or that direct communication is the standard at a wealth management bank like this doesn’t mean lack of preparedness is okay. In other words what omissions or lapses should a millionaire be okay with.<p>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.

&gt; 3 SIMPLE STEPS TO GET SET UP<p>where Step 2 is to follow additional steps :D<p>kinda like drawing an owl<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.kym-cdn.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;images&#x2F;newsfeed&#x2F;000&#x2F;572&#x2F;078&#x2F;d6d.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.kym-cdn.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;images&#x2F;newsfeed&#x2F;000&#x2F;572&#x2F;078&#x2F;d6d...</a>

My credit union (well, the company that hosts their banking site) was always MONTHS behind on browser support for Safari. Random shit would break at each major update, I ended up just using browser X for accessing their site.<p>Amazing how you can have millions of customers but don&#x27;t test the Safari betas.

Customer tells bank to disable account and upgrades to a different bank.

The better question is does anyone in this category actually have their act together? Most private banking apps I’ve seen are pretty abysmal

Wouldn&#x27;t the fact that they know ahead of time that their current app is incompatible show that they somewhat care about techmology?

Doesn&#x27;t apple put out APIs and such for developers at least 6 months ahead so they can make sure this doesn&#x27;t happen?

why on earth is no one one the side of the bank here? apple is using a backdoor into their hardware to cut people off from their funds. This is a gairly serious security breach and the bank is asvising customers to mitigate it.

completely normal for large companies just to simplify IT management &#x2F; make sure all applications used by the company are compatible

If I worked here I would resign immediately.

LOOL we are not secured, please do not upgrade to let the stuff continue to works xD

&gt; We’ll let you know when we recommend upgrading to iOS 16.<p>Oh, how kind of you.

FISERV sucks

Good luck with that.

What horse shit. I have been running iOS 16 beta (with Lockdown Mode) for quite a while and all business related apps that I use work fine.<p>IOS 16 improves security and privacy, so is it possible that this famous bank could be doing something dodgy?

Regulation.<p>Good, old-fashioned, regulation. There&#x27;s no other meaningful way to prevent this sort of thing. Now that we&#x27;re dealing with &quot;people&#x27;s money&quot; there should be energy to push this through.<p>(And to be clear, it&#x27;s Apple that needs to be regulated.)

The EU bank market is weird.<p>Most comments here don&#x27;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&#x27;t care - it&#x27;s another person problem, so they don&#x27;t want gizmos to enhance &quot;safety&quot; if they are cumbersome.<p>The intersection of these customers with Coutts typical clients (&gt;500k in liquid funds according to the comments below) may be just as high as the N26 users (let&#x27;s say, &quot;less privileged&quot;) who want the latest mobile OS version and receive OTPs by SMS to protect their precious $100 purchase.