After the October 30th upcoming update, all iOS users of the Lumi Wallet will be forcibly logged out from their wallets. Those who have not backed up their mnemonic will lose their money, as they will not be able to re-login. Why will the upcoming update affect only iOS users?! Apple support believes that their internal rules are more important than the client’s reputation and their own users’ money. Lumi Wallet CEO Diana Furman wrote an article to tell the whole story behind this situation with Apple.
No one on the Lumi Wallet team imagined that the simple procedure of legal restructuring would turn into a real disaster because of the wrong recommendations from Apple’s support team.
Due to a strategic decision, Lumi Wallet changed its entity from Hong Kong to Cyprus and started the same procedure on all official accounts, including the App Store. Apple’s Developer Support advised creating a new account using the Cyprus company and to transfer the Lumi app to the newly created account. They just forgot to mention that this would lead to lost keychain access, meaning users would be forcibly logged out of their wallets.
Seems like nothing serious, except not for cold-storage wallets as they haven’t got access to users’ private keys and do not store them on servers. Users fully control their accounts, and if they do not backup their mnemonic, they will lose access to their funds forever. This means that after being forcibly logged out, dozens or even hundreds of users will not be able to re-login.
After realizing the consequence of the logout, Lumi dealt with the App Store to find out a solution, but Apple’s support threw Lumi’s team from one support manager to another without a concrete answer.
A long-term conversation with Apple’s support team, which was described in detail by Diana in the article, didn’t bring any results. Apple’s support believes that a one-time log out is not that bad. Waiting for the custom support decision for several weeks without an answer and no other options for the Lumi Wallet team, they just started to prepare users for the logout. However, no matter how “aggressively” Lumi’s team notifies users to backup their wallets, there still might be a lot of people who don’t back up the mnemonic.
Final
While being a cryptocurrency company is a difficult thing for a product creator, and crypto adoption is an extremely important task, the tech giants like Apple make this adoption more complicated. Lumi Wallet, like other crypto brands, faced total carelessness around its business interests. Who knows how many cases like this will be in the future, but we still believe that Apple is a tech company that is capable of solving such a problem and will not harm businesses that work hard to come up with the best solutions on the market.
