I suspect the app development was out-sourced to developers in Another Place where the culture is *not* to ask questions of the customer because to do so implies that the specification was inadequate, and this is extremely disrespectful.
Of course any developer will tell you that there's *always* holes in the spec, particularly if prepared by management who simply don't know what the developer needs to know - because they're not developers and there will be stuff that's "obvious" to them but they don't have the experience of knowing just how devious things like names and dates and postcodes can be.
Rather the outsourced programmers develop *precisely* what has been specified - and don't go back to the customer to suggest that a 'yyyy-mm-dd' placeholder might be a good idea.
Being a programmer is frustrating - there's so much bad code out there. The "enter card number without spaces" is perhaps the canonical example. In pretty much any language stripping non-numerics from a string is a single line of code. Your card number is printed in groups of four to facilitate readback - but this is then deliberately broken. If the user wants to separate the groups of four with a space, or a dash, or not - let them. At the end of the day it is either valid, or not.