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PayPal Closes Security Hole, But Now How Can It Get iPhone Users To Upgrade?
Of course, there’s an obvious way to force users to upgrade: Just stop allowing the insecure iPhone app to do mobile payments. When a user tries to use the outdated version of the app, instead of being able to check a balance or transfer funds, the app could just inform the user that he must upgrade his app or he can’t access PayPal from his iPhone.
If that sounds like a logical approach to the problem—well, yes, it is. Now just imagine four million users getting messages telling them they can’t make the purchase or payment they want to make right now because they can’t transfer funds into PayPal—not until they spend a few minutes downloading an upgrade. That would make four million very unhappy PayPal customers.
And that’s a very M-Commerce-specific problem. With E-Commerce, each customer has a Web browser talking to an E-tailer’s Web site. If there’s a security hole in the browser, only one piece of software on the customer’s PC has to be upgraded (and that upgrade usually improves security for many Web sites). If the security flaw is in the Web site’s code, that can be patched once, and it improves security for all customers everywhere.
But mobile commerce depends on smartphones containing dozens or hundreds of apps. Each app may have security holes. Upgrading the app only solves the problem for that app. And the problem clearly lies not with a browser maker like Microsoft or Firefox or Apple but with the M-Commerce retailer whose name is on the app.
That’s pretty likely to annoy users. And any heavy-handed attempt to nudge them into upgrading to a version that doesn’t offer the customer any new features is sure to irritate them even more.
For the customer, it’s a tradeoff between security and convenience. And in the PayPal case, there’s no cost to the user in insecurity. The most convenient thing for users is to be insecure.
For the M-Commerce retailer, the tradeoff is between security and customer satisfaction—and there is a real cost attached to both sides. But short of a new killer feature that gives customers a real reason to upgrade, it’s a tradeoff without a good solution.
-Marc
November 11th, 2010 at 9:40 am
And there lies the inherent problems with “apps”. The whole point of the internet was to provide functionality and make it universally available from anywhere and anytime. The internet essentially fixed the software distribution problems that have plagued the industry since its early days. In order to differentiate itself (and to mask the fact that it is not a “cloud” company like Google but rather a “hardware” company liked Dell), Apple has pushed the idea of mobile apps onto us. Customers don’t care and ran with Apple who, truth be told, has traditionally offered superior usability and an “integrated” (some say closed…) ecosystem. BUT…the model is inherently flawed. Mobile apps are flawed and are, for all intents and purposes, a giant step back in the evolution of computing and convenience. I hope we collectively move towards HTML5 mobile apps which will have the same use and feel as native apps (in the majority of cases) but are “always up to date” and have the distribution advantages of web applications.