A Beta OS can be dangerous
I awoke a few days ago to a rent-money reminder from my landlord — I’d forgotten to wire the money due for last month’s rent before I flew out from my home country to WWDC (Apple’s annual developer conference).
Not to worry, I thought, I’ll just log into my bank’s mobile banking app on my iPhone and send it over like I usually do. Except this time, my mobile banking app wouldn’t exactly work… And by that, I mean it wouldn’t let me log in. Then it hit me, my now-buggy banking app was freaking out as a result of me installing iOS 8 on my only iOS device.
Once I realised that I needed my banking app to authorise my login to their online banking web portal, combined with the fact that I’d forgotten my telephone banking passcode (who uses telephone banking nowadays?), and that there are no branches of my bank in the US, I knew I was in a bit of a tough spot. Such a tough spot was only made more clear by the telephone agent who reiterated that they couldn’t offer me any assistance for authorising a rent-money wire when my only option to remotely bank (i.e. my mobile banking app) was now acting up.
For something as ‘simple’ as rent money, there are, of course, workarounds: I could’ve used PayPal, I could’ve wired the money via another financial institution, and in my case I was able to very thankfully rely on a family member and my landlord’s goodwill to cover for the few days I have left in the US.
In my situation, the ending was never going to be tragic, but this got me thinking — a lot of us (developers) ignore the warnings of others to refrain from installing a beta OS on our only personal devices. Alarmingly, more and more consumers (i.e. friends of developers who just have to be able to iMessage from the lock-screen) are installing beta software on their smartphones. What other use-cases are there, aside from banking, that have the potential to disrupt an individual’s situation and throw them into a troubling predicament?
We rely on our mobile devices increasingly these days (take my example of essentially never using any of the other, somewhat archaic, options of managing my bank account available to me), and such a trend is only likely to carry on upwards. What if, for example, I’d purchased event tickets that I couldn’t access through the event management’s app? What if I’d rented an app-friendly car and couldn’t unlock it again after losing my card; what if I was stranded with said car and couldn’t get my mapping app to work? Excuse my lack of creativity in examples, but if you let your mind wander for a little while, you’ll be surprised how the most mundane services we rely on via our smartphones create sometimes catastrophic problems on a faulty device…
The moral of the story? Perhaps it’s best not to install beta OS versions on your smartphone until you can be sure your essential services function normally, or you can afford a second, testing device. If, in my case, your line of work requires you to install iOS 8, check to make sure you have back-up methods to access crucial amenities (e.g. banking), and that you’re prepared to face the consequences when your trusty apps don’t function quite how you expected them to.
Wise developers always heed and insist the warning to others not to use a beta operating system on a ‘main’, or in my case only, device. Now I know why.