[JeanMarcS]

My brother doesn't have à smartphone (by choice).

For example, he cannot access his bank account via his desktop anymore. He have to go to his agency in person.

Well we all did that for years so it's just annoying, because he still have the possibility to do it and it's his choice.

But what will happen if all the brick and mortar close ? When will it be mandatory to get a smartphone for his bank app, just to have access to his money ?

And it's just an example...

[adrian_b]

While I have a smartphone, I choose to not have a Google account.

One of the banks that I am using has terminated its on-line banking service, which I had been using for almost 20 years, replacing it with an app.

That would not have been a problem if they would have provided the app themselves on their Web site, but they refuse to do this and they provide the app only in the Google on-line store, which I cannot use because I do not have a Google account, despite the fact that the app is free.

Therefore I have reduced a lot the number of operations that I do through that bank, redirecting them to another bank, which still has on-line banking on their Web site. Fortunately, for now the bank that has closed their on-line banking Web site still keeps an SMS service, which allows me e.g. to check the balance of my account from my phone and which notifies me about the transactions on my credit card.

Many years ago, I have closed all my accounts at a bank that has annoyed me by updating their on-line banking Web site so that it no longer accepted any browsers except Microsoft Internet Explorer. At that time I have hoped that it will be the last time when I leave a bank because they believe that they can force their customers to also be customers of unrelated third parties, but now this problem with Google has appeared.

I am not a US citizen and the bank is not from USA. I doubt that it can be legal for a bank here in Europe to condition their services by their customer becoming the customer of a foreign entity that is Google. However I cannot afford to waste time and money to determine the legality of their actions.

[ajolly]

Can you use Aurora store? https://auroraoss.com/ (That's what I use when I don't want to put a Google account on an Android phone)

[adrian_b]

Thanks for pointing to that.

I was not aware of it, so when I will have time I will experiment with it, to see if it works for downloading the app I need when logging in anonymously.

[morkalork]

I had some hilariously degenerate experiences with this recently. There are basic services that branches won't provide at all anymore like cashing cheques, which can be annoying in some circumstance. But the real dumb one was being blocked from taking a certain action in the online banking with a message like "present yourself with 2 forms of government ID at a local branch". OK. Fine. Drive there, wait in line, blah blah blah. The teller looks at me like I'm crazy when I say that online banking sent me there. They figure it out, do the KYC process, unblock me and I say great now can you do the thing I was trying to do before all this? "No, you must use online banking for that."

[lucb1e]

> But what will happen if all the brick and mortar close ?

Hello, it's me from the future, reporting live from Germany. My bank is online only and to talk to a person, I need to call the hotline and wait (I shit you not) 20~25 minutes for the PIN input prompt to repeat itself once too many times and time out, handing me off to a very confused human who is wondering how I'm speaking to them unauthenticated (they're very suspicious and will not answer most questions; it's a pretty useless party trick). Alternatively, you can have the answering machine send you an authentication code by snail mail which you can then use once in the next few days to call them one time

I put up with it because the other bank account I applied for rejected me for not being creditworthy (never had a debt in my life, but also no loan, so there is no credit data and apparently that's suspicious; on the other hand, students get accounts there with no problem, so maybe it's a combination of no credit data and age? Or not having citizenship? They're not saying of course, I can only assume it's an illegal reason because why else not say it). The other bank card I own from a neighboring country isn't accepted in most supermarkets, I'd need to bring cash into the country or pay extra for using an ATM abroad. Single European Market is really lovely, you should try it

[jasdi]

Good news is we are already hitting upper limits of how many people we can reach via apps/smartphone/internet.

Limits that in the past 2 decades (of scaling) the people who built these Platforms didn't have to think about. Now they do. And they are coming under serious pressure because they have built out more Supply than there is Demand.

For example, we got the explosive growth of Netflix. Everyone sees that and piles into streaming. When growth slows in one country they immediately move into another and they keep growing until they run out of countries to expand into. So Netflix has been in India (a country advertised as having zillions of consumers) for nearly 10 years now but they haven't found more than 25 million paying subscribers. Learning takes time. And everyone is learning there are limits to growth based purely on the online model.

[porridgeraisin]

While I agree with your overarching point re:saturation,

> haven't found more than 25 million subscribers

There is a metric ton of demand for steaming services in India.. just that amazon prime and hotstar.com took most of the market. Most of this is due to pricing:

Prime: 999 INR/year Netflix: 650 INR/month

Recently they've tried segmenting.. by packaging a single-device 720p-only plan along with the telecom plans, and I'd bet that's the majority of their customer base today since people get it for free. They also have a deal with samsung and other companies that make mid-range phones which most people in india own to have netflix pre-installed. So this + the telecom plans is the way they count them as users.

To be fair, amazon packages theirs with the 1-day delivery service on amazon.in, so it's a bit of an unfair advantage there. But even if you compare with hotstar, they charge 1499/year, which is about 1/6th of netflix's price.

Again to be fair, live cricket streaming is _huge_ here, and people get hotstar for that anyways, so a bit of an unfair advantage again.

Even twitch managed to make price cuts here. I bet netflix can as well. I doubt regional content production is actually a problem for somebody like netflix.

[sumuyuda]

The solution is that banks should support any TOTP client for authentication and not just their proprietary app. So you can use open source software or a hardware key.

[everdrive]

But they won't. HN is quite good at suggesting a lot of genuinely intelligent and valid potential technical solutions, but most banks won't even think about supporting TOTP broadly. They'll lean into smartphones and apps because this is where the bast majority of their customers are. In this case the 'tyranny' is the overwhelming preference of other people. The masses have spoken, and they want everything to be on their phones.

[iforgotpassword]

Also because ticking boxes. You just provide an app that fulfills all the silly security requirements for banking apps and then if something goes wrong, the customer has the burden of proving it's the banks fault.

I've had my banking app installed on an old Samsung phone running lineageos. I only powered it on when I had to do online banking. At some point I needed to update the app and they started checking for rooted devices, so it wouldn't work anymore. Now I've installed it on a much newer android device that I also use for a lot of other crap and sketchy stuff I don't want on my main phone. Also it's powered on all the time. Whether that's really more secure than what I did before is questionable.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Maybe not for you, but rooted phones are a legitimate risk for users that do sideload pirated games and malware etc. I still think the risks are arbitrary, but I can understand why banks want to avoid rooted phones

[lucb1e]

Then they should also avoid rooted Windows machines where malware is a legitimate risk and orders of magnitude more prevalent than on mobile. Doing one but not the other is arbitrary and just pushes people towards having a locked-down device that they don't fully control with them all the time (can't uninstall tracking software from the vendor, for example). A locked-down computer that just sits in your office all day would be less worrisome

[hsbauauvhabzb]

If they could enforce locked down desktops, I’m sure they would.

[nkrisc]

And that’s where the government needs to step in order in order to advocate for the minority.

[sebazzz]

The ING has a small Android based single-purpose authenticator device they offer to customers without smartphones. It can scan the QR code and do the auth.

[Kwpolska]

Can your TOTP client show what operation you’re approving? Because my bank app can.

[mr_mitm]

A chip TAN generator can. I'm glad my bank is still supporting those.

[adrian_b]

I had a couple of such TOTP clients from different banks. For approving an operation, both of them required me to sign the amount of money transferred by that operation (i.e. they generated a one-time code that depended on a hash of the amount of money), so no confusions were possible.

[cenamus]

I really felt that when I was waiting for a replacement display from china for about 3 months...

If you want to do stuff at a physical bank you pay fees for everything, if there's even a branch still open close to you.

Can't even buy bus tickets without an app (tracks your journey with GPS of course), without paying more, even at ticket machines in the busses.

[hypeatei]

> If you want to do stuff at a physical bank you pay fees for everything

This hasn't been my experience at all in the US. If you need something in-person, going to the bank is the best option since they don't charge fees like a random ATM does.

[SilasX]

Related issue: how every website seems to migrate to some smartphone-optimized version that looks like a mobile app blown up to a bigger screen that works much worse on desktop. Hall of Shame: Twitter, Facebook, even Vanguard.

What's even more confusing/frustrating is that, despite being developed with very elaborate, mature frameworks, they still lack basic UI accommodations, like making clickable elements detectable by add-ons, or allowing you to open up a detail view in a new tab.

I get if Joe Shmoe's cobbled-together app forgets some things, but why wouldn't stuff like that be rolled in as a default, with all the development hours applied to it?

[mrweasel]

My bank is developing a new version of their online banking solution. They've decided to model in on their app, which I refuse to use because it's absolutely garbage. So now I have a online banking platform that can't do copy/paste on, hides much of the relevant information and is generally much harder to use than the old version.

I've provide feedback on multiple occasions, but I don't have high hopes for them to fix anything. If I where running a business and to use the site every day I'd be pissed and threatening to move my business else where.

[SkiFire13]

My bank used to provide you with a small TOTP device the size of a usb key. Sadly they eventually deprecated it and recently dismissed it entirely in favor of their increadibly slow app.

[pseingatl]

With a text sent to your phone for TFA. Which means you can't access your accou nt if you travel. You could always access it with the TOTP device.

[captainbland]

In the UK loads of bank branches have closed. They've opened up "hubs" which are a joke, some are open only have weekend opening hours of Saturday morning and you usually have to travel to a different town to get to it.

[MattGaiser]

Where is this bank? Are there not other banks that do allow access via branches or online?

[em-bee]

i can't access any of my online accounts without a phone. one at least still does simple sms, so it doesn't require a smartphone, but it requires a phone nonetheless. the other requires an app. the problem is that this is a trend. more and more banks switch to requiring apps. if we don't fight the trend, then all banks will do it. switching banks now does not work because the new bank does not know that this is the reason you switched, and the old bank is also unlikely to track this detail.

[genewitch]

In the US: chase bank, us bank, do not require 2FA unless you don't have a cookie. I don't have to use an app for any of the banks we use.

[doctor_radium]

You're getting downvoted, but here in a populated but not very interesting part of Pennsylvania there must be 15 different banks or credit unions with brick & mortar offices within 10 miles. I lament that not everyone has this degree of choice, but it's not a fantasy.

There may be an online-only bank somewhere in the USA that's app-only, but I wouldn't know. Every bank I've ever encountered has a very functional web site.

[MattGaiser]

We have an app only bank in Canada called WealthSimple, but hardly the only choice.

The problem here seems to be that people want the free accounts and low fees of app only banks, but still want the costly things they got rid of that make those possible like branches.

[pseingatl]

The advantage of having to go to the branch in person is that KYC is never an issue.

[ekianjo]

the solution is to let the market do its work and move to another bank?

[bloak]

I rather get the impression that the market doesn't always work like economists would like it to work. But do we really need competing banks just for the basic stuff like processing payments? It seems plausible that it's a good idea to have multiple competing banks for the more complex services but perhaps the basic processing of payments could be handled by the government, which already has the monopoly of providing the currency in the first place. Just a thought. Free markets are a tool, not a religion, right?

Some people might insist that a government monopoly would be worse but here in the UK I've noticed that government web sites are usually less crap than web sites created by the private sector.

[Neonlicht]

Or maybe the people who hate smartphones and technology are tiny inconsequential minority that doesn't outweigh the billions in savings?

We can't afford to have people doing bullshit jobs at bank branches anymore- unemployment is too low.

[teeray]

Voting with your feet only works if there’s somewhere else for you to walk to.

[em-bee]

in many places there is no bank that offers an alternative

[ekianjo]

Not sure what you mean. There are numerous online banks that can operate country wide, and surely there is at least one of them that offer web banking without requiring an app?

[derac]

I don't get why your parent was downvoted. If you live in the middle of nowhere without a cell phone, life is going to be tougher.

[tmnvix]

> If you live in the middle of nowhere without a cell phone, life is going to be tougher.

I think the issue is that it is becoming tougher than it was prior to the existence of smartphones for those without them.

[dumbfounder]

Then you will need to use an app.

[Yeul]

By choice. Society doesn't penalize anyone if they decide to go off the grid.

Look at it this way: should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank office?

[elpocko]

That's a huge jump from "no smartphone" to "off the grid."

I prefer using laptops and I prefer doing my banking on my laptop. I'm online a lot. I do have a smartphone, usually an older one, for calls, messaging, playing music and taking photos. I even have an old Samsung tablet, for reading ebooks.

It should be possible to do your banking from a laptop.

I just don't want apps on my phone, because they will track me, I don't like using apps on the phone in general, and banking apps in particular because the bank wants to control what I can and can't do with my own phone. Want a rooted phone? No banking for you.

[hilbert42]

"Look at it this way: should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank office?"

To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill and others—and the many issues that surround utility and utilitarian principles. This involves such issues as the greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering well established moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable consensuses were achieved.

Think twice, the obvious solution doesn't always turn out to be the most optimal one.

[Yeul]

I'm sorry I'm not losing sleep over the life choices of weirdos on HN but I will happily pay taxes for universal healthcare don't you worry!

[ctrlp]

Utilitarian models of ethics are fraught with peril themselves. Not the own you think it is.

[hilbert42]

So are many other political and philosophical ideas—essentially any field involving ethics is fraught with perils and consensus is never fully reached.

Just because unanimity is never achieved in respect of some philosophical idea doesn't mean it's not worthy of consideration and or it's never put into practice. Utilitarianism has been the subject of much study and debate and it's been widely practiced over several hundred years.

I'm well aware of the debates over utilitarianism and its ethics, any why those for and against it take the (usually) entrenched stance that they do. That ought to have been obvious by my use of the word 'consensuses'.

BTW, I could have made the same argument from a different philosophical perspective but the previous commentator specifically invited a utilitarian-type response by the words he used. That said, no matter what philosophical argument I'd have used someone would have found fault with it.

My main point still stands, which is that obvious solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones. Note, I've deliberately not used the word 'best' for the above reasons.

[ctrlp]

You could just as easily have cited Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas or any other philosopher who wrote an ethics. The previous commentator didn't invite a utilitarian-type response. He implicitly posed a question about the justification for the ordering of goods in society. Nothing about that statement is definitively answered (or even satisfyingly questioned) by big-U Utilitarianism.

Since you appear to enjoy a little bit of philosophical discussion, let's break down what you ackshually said:

> To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill and others—and the many issues that surround utility and utilitarian principles.

The "beginning" of ethics hardly begins with Bentham or Mill or even the Enlightenment. Utility is quite a modern concept in ethics. The question of what is "the good" is presupposed in any system of value. "The greatest good for the greatest number" is perhaps one of the more perverse interpretations of human good on record.

> This involves such issues as the greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering well established moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable consensuses were achieved.

The majority of modern states and cities were most emphatically NOT "founded" on utilitarian models. Most states predate any notion of such post-hoc rationalizations. Cities were largely founded as commercial centers along trade routes or ports, or sometimes intentionally as colonies. States were largely the results of conquest by militarized groups that were certainly NOT utilitarian. Quite the contrary. In the bronze age, they would have simply been warrior bands centered around family/tribal bonds and vassal/suzerainty relationships founded on violence. By the time of the great early empires around the Mediterranean, formal structures of militarism and class privileges won through violence were the organizing forms of society, not "give-and-take" consensus gathering (unless you mean one group giving up the fight and the other either enslaving them or killing them outright).

Maybe you could have argued they are founded on something like Hobbesian social contract theory (certainly not Rousseau's version) but that, too, would suffer from being simply "not true in fact."

The main point that "obvious solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones" suffers from being trivial, condescending, and a non sequitur. The commenter didn't offer a solution as such, but raised the obvious question of why they should have to pay for someone else's choices. Utilitarianism is the worst of all philosophical answers because it entails the most absurdities.

[hilbert42]

Point proven, your comment just confirms what I said earlier:

…an(d) why those for and against it take the (usually) entrenched stance that they do.

I'm aware of those issues and omissions for brevity's sake. Also, I would point out that what I said was a passing comment on HN and not meant for a paper in a learned philosophical journal.

BTW, in case you didn't notice, I never mentioned whether I was for or against utilitarianism specifically because discussion about it inevitability ends in arguments that usually remain unresolved. That it was just an example ought to have been obvious.

It would be informative to compare the syllabus content at your philosophy school versus that of mine.

[atlintots]

Go on, then. Elaborate.

[mariusor]

I have a smartphone. However I choose to use a mobile OS that is neither Android nor iOS, why should I get penalized that banks don't invest in applications for my OS too?

[briandear]

It’s business. Should a steakhouse be required to have vegan offerings? If that’s not what their customers want, then why would they invest hundreds of thousands on building and maintaining an app that maybe five people would use?

[ncallaway]

They do not have to build an app. They could build a mobile website that is accessible from almost any computing platform.

For something so core and critical to society (banking), I don’t think it’s reasonable to leave it up to the private sector and say “well, if some people get left behind—ho hum, thems the breaks”

If we’re talking about a florist, then sure. The market wants what it wants and if you’re not in the majority it kinda sucks. Not great, but probably not a place for government intervention. Banking, though? There should be accessibility guidelines and standards, absolutely.

[mariusor]

When businesses provide essential services (like banking) I feel like they should be held to the same standards as government services. Not that some governments don't treat users without Android or iOS as third class citizens.

So, to clarify, there are banks that have their full business value accessible only through mobile, and as a person needing banking but doesn't have access to mobile, I can make an informed decision and not be their customer. But when I create a bank account in a physical office, and then the office gets closed in favour of an alegedly much more accessible mobile application, I feel like there should be some measure protecting me from that. Do you find that unreasonable?

[jtbayly]

> "should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank office?”

Yes! There are many things you cannot do without a physical bank location. It is worth paying[1] something to have them. I used to use an online-only bank, but I realized I wanted to be able to walk into a branch at times, so I switched to a new bank.

[1] “Paying” can mean a variety of things, including lower interest rates on savings accounts, for example.

[Kwpolska]

What are those mythical actions that can't be done outside of a physical location? How many of them are things you do ~once in a lifetime, like getting a mortgage?

[genewitch]

I need 100 rolls of quarters. I need 500 $2 bills. I need to change my pin on a debit card.

I need to change all these $2 bills and quarters into $20 bills.

Trivial examples that I have done at my bank. Maybe drbit cards now don't need to be put into a machine to change the pin anymore, idk.

[Kwpolska]

The PIN thing can be done online at both of my banks.

As for the cash stuff, those are things you may need to do if you’re a shopkeeper, but I can’t imagine a reason why I would do that myself. Banks over here will sometimes charge fees for changing cash.

[genewitch]

in the US $2 bills are an icebreaker. There's still a lot of people that don't believe they're real. I also used them as incentives for my kids to go above and beyond with their communal chores. The quarters thing i haven't done personally but i was adjacent to for a club, it was for a game in a booth at an event.

banks here don't charge, as one of their expected roles is to change money in the US.

[Spivak]

I mean I've used an online only bank for years now and there's nothing I haven't been able to do. They send cashier's checks by mail.

I suppose if I wanted to deposit cash I couldn't but it's never come up.

[adrian_b]

At least for me, the problem is not the closing of the brick-and-mortar branches, though that has happened near me, because for the last 25 years I have used those only seldom, preferring on-line banking.

What annoys me now is the closing of the on-line banking Web sites, which could be used easily and without any problem from any computer or smartphone, and their replacement with apps, which may force you not only to have a smartphone but also to be a customer of Apple or Google, because some banks refuse to provide their Android apps otherwise than through the Google app store.

[genewitch]

How is this different though. Infrastructure costs money. Apps are the new hotness. The same "well, I don't use it so whatever" you bring is what it seems like the online banking folks are saying to the brick and mortar people.

Has anyone looked at the world lately and thought "hey maybe all these apps aren't the greatest idea"? Amazon, Shein, Temu, AliExpress have all but made history just visiting a mall and browsing.

I know Walmart loved the pandemic, too, because all the mom and pop stores that survived the first 20 years of amazon couldn't survive the local and state and federal government interfering with their commerce.

JoAnns is closing hundreds of stores. This whole subject is on my mind a lot lately.

[dennis_jeeves2]

What I'm stating below is my general understanding of this subject, If I'm wrong and if you i.e the reader have investigated sufficiently on the subject let me know.

>Society doesn't penalize anyone if they decide to go off the grid

While they don't penalize you, they do make it extremely difficult, if not impossible to go completely off grid. Try putting up your own 'grid', which in IMO should include your own monetary system, and not having to pay taxes.

[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

It’s a bad rebuttal because you’re paying for the phone, and the bank pays for their office with what they gain from credits, stock market stuff…

If the bank had no office it wouldn’t be cheaper.

[echoangle]

At least in germany, there are both traditional banks with offices and online-only banks and one of the reasons given for the fact that traditional banks have worse conditions (less interest, sometimes monthly charges for even having an account etc.) is that they hvae to pay the offices somehow.