Ledger Nano S Wallet Device’s Latest Upgrade Was Not Properly Tested, Reduced User Storage

Businesses are notorious for caring less about their customers and being the unashamed priests at the altar of Mammon. Their tricks to sometimes seduce and sometimes induce their customers into spending money has widely been reported today, thanks to the advent of social media and the internet. This makes it really hard for them to pull off shady tactics without being called out on it. That seems to have been the case for Ledger who has been facing a backlash over its latest firmware upgrade, that allegedly impacts the overall storage space of their wallets

The cryptocurrency hardware wallet manufacturer from France, who is arguably an industry leader in their field, has been getting a lot of bad press when it was found that their latest firmware update, to their Nano S wallet, affected the storage capacity of their device. The company has quickly responded by saying that this has been an unforeseen result of the changes implemented but many users felt this was a more deliberate attempt to make the device obsolete and thus bolster sales.

In the middle of January Ledger had announced their latest patch, version 1.5.5 for Nano S. This was to help third-party developers, allowing them to append certain algorithms, something that was incompatible with the previous firmware and would lead to an overall improvement in application management. However, a couple of weeks in and a lot of Reddit chatter began to criticize this attempt. Reactions ranging from mild disappointment to unbridled fury had one thing in common, the users had found that after installing the update the storage capacity of the wallet had declined. And a common theme that quickly took shape was best summed by a user posting:

“Ledger Nano S (firmware version 1.5.5) can’t even hold BTC, ETH and XRP apps at the same time… is this really an ‘update,’ or just a cynical ploy to sell more devices?!”

As the tempest brew, the manufacturer quickly went into damage control mode. Aware of the backlash they quickly acknowledged the issue and issued an official statement.

“When planning for this update we didn’t anticipate the impact it would have on Ledger Nano S capacity. This was not planned obsolescence, simply put, we messed up. We apologize and we’re committed to making it right.”

Yet, nearly 50 days after the patch release and more than two weeks after the company’s apology there has been little by way of any concrete action that would encourage one to expect a working solution soon. This lack of communication means that even if they are hard at work towards fixing the bug, users are skeptical and debate if this was a ploy to sell more hardware.

Leading credence to this pessimism is the fact that most companies, especially the size of Leader, would have a testing phase where such a simple thing would have been checked. Furthermore, it is quite a coincidence that the pre-sale for the new Nano X wallet has been recently launched. The new hardware has more storage and better performance, something that would make the newer model an attractive option.

One certainly hopes it is not true, after all the bane of modern existence is that the good done by a person/ enterprise often gets buried while the faults get magnified. Yet if it is true, then the community should be commended for calling out the business for its shady practice. Unfortunately, like in the case of iPhone, big businesses have a habit of being dodgy and mostly getting away with it. Thus the need for consumer vigilance is at its highest today.