I think you're right and I think I insufficiently considered malice as the reason for a lot of this type of minimalism. This "SWW" message is great as it doesn't even give a hint as to whether the problem is with the server (all vendor's fault), the network (not vendor's fault), or a client fault (maybe vendor's fault, maybe customer just needs to update it). Users can just do brute force things like "Swipe up the app and open it up again" and eventually just give up.