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0 pointsarjie14h ago0 comments

Reading between the lines, the author of the blog post would have gone along with the verification with annoyance if the verification had worked. What seems to have prompted everything is the credit cards failing. The fact that they couldn't use Wallet and then tried manually with all five sort of illustrates that they would have gone along with it.

Edge cases like immigrants in a different land are typically unmet for these things. I remember once trying to re-activate my Google Fi SIM from my home in the UK before I returned to the US and getting a strange error message that didn't allude to the region. I got the rep on the line and they said "You're in the US, right?" and I had to bullshit something about "oh I had my VPN on" and then turned it on so I would like I was in the US and it worked then.

Anyway, there's clearly one cause and the rest is just kitchen sink argumentation.

0 comments

loloquwowndueo13h ago

> Edge cases like immigrants in a different land

It’s a brutal faux pas from Apple to consider immigrants an “edge case”. We are a significant group in many countries. (That said - I don’t have any banking products from my country of origin anymore)

arjieOP13h ago

I think it's unavoidable to end up triggering these since we're not really that common once it lands up with the specifics. It's rarely "immigrants" as a class but more "people with ID A in country B". I'm an Indian national with permanent residence in the US who lived in the UK. I have bank accounts in all three countries and I really don't expect them to work cross nationally reliably. If anything would, it would have to be the US stuff but I wouldn't count on it.

I mean, I'd consider it important for it to work, but when it doesn't I wouldn't consider it a brutal faux pas so much as a moment of frustration at the kind of engineer who only happy-path builds.

rurp11h ago

I think this is one of the biggest tragedies from big tech companies. Their automated approaches usually work great for most people, but will be hopelessly broken for edge cases, often with no recourse. This happens all the time with non-standard location histories.

It's also amazing how badly big tech apps will often fail with poor or no internet connection. Clearly a lot of the developers at these companies never leave the cities they live and work in.

Other industries can be just as bad, but it's particularly grating coming from companies that constantly talk about diversity, individual empowerment, and other nice sounding corporate slop.

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