All bank related apps are currently unavailable including Tinkoff, Tinkoff for Business, Tinkoff Mobile and Tinkoff Investments. In addition, the Uralsib, Zenit, Levoberezhny and Primorye banks have lost access to the Apple application store. They also cannot be downloaded or updated on Apple devices.
All of the listed banks fell under the 10th EU sanctions package, adopted at the end of February. Previously, the removal of the Apple App Store only affected banks that were subject to blocking sanctions by US authorities, in whose jurisdiction Apple is located. This is how applications from Sberbank, VTB, Alfa-Bank and others were removed from the App Store and Google Play.
The only case involving removal from the App Store due to third-country sanctions involved VK apps, which were removed following UK sanctions against individuals allegedly affiliated with the company. Later, all restrictions were lifted, and VK applications became available to iOS users again.
This is probably due to the fact that the apps from Tinkoff and all other banks included in the 10 sanctions package are still available on Google Play.
At the same time, Tinkoff Bank assured that already downloaded applications will work normally. “You can transfer money, top up your account and perform other operations. Or do the same in your personal account on the Tinkoff website,” the message reads.
Given this situation, it is of fundamental importance that users of Apple devices do not remove banking applications from their devices, since it will no longer be possible to re-install them from the application store.
As one of the options for circumventing sanctions, applications developed by third parties periodically appear in Apple’s application stores and provide access to the sanctions banks service. So, SBOL applications appeared twice, which allowed access to Sberbank services, and “Everything is simple” for VTB Bank services. Later they were removed, but a significant part of the users managed to download them. The new version of the “Everything is simple” application is now available for download. Sber, for its part, launched a special service at its branches, through which users of Apple technology can get the latest version of the application on their devices.
As Eldar Murtazin, a lead analyst at Mobile Research Group, pointed out, the key difference between the new versions of the apps is that, unlike the versions that were released on the AppStore, they don’t use Apple’s infrastructure. that is no longer available to them. The simplest example is PUSH notifications and payment billing from third-party sites. For users of the Sber canonical application, they have not been working for at least six months, but in various versions of SBOL everything works as intended.
