If I spent $9.1 million on something (I’m a journalist, I never will), I’d like it to give me bang for my buck. As Gizmodo reports, though, the federal government spent that massive amount on its COVIDSafe app which ended up finding not many cases of the virus at all. It did drain everyone’s phone battery, so there’s that I guess.
Representatives from the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) were grilled about the app on Monday, October 25th, specifically about its continued use.
After launching all the way back in April 2020, the costly app has set the federal government back $9.1 million, with $2.7 million of that alone going to Amazon Web Services to host it.
The remainder of that amount, if you’re wondering, was spent on “a series of capabilities that have been used from the market, ranging from the use of strategy services, development services and also legal services.”
The DTA said there has been 7.7 million registrations of the COVIDSafe app, although that doesn’t account for how many of those folk downloaded the app and proceeded to delete it. With QR code check-in apps offering a far more user-friendly experience, there’s probably a fair few who did just that.
A report was published in July detailing the issues with the COVIDSafe app: it stated that only 17 unique detections had been discovered through the app. The government, however, said that COVIDSafe helped locate 37,500 potential virus encounters.
The app was supposed to work through Bluetooth technology to create and maintain an anonymous registry of close contacts. If one of these contact self-identified as having COVID-19 by using the app, government contact tracers would be alerted, notifying you to get tested and isolate.
With NSW and Victoria now emerging from their latest long and gruelling lockdowns, the COVIDSafe app just looks like an expensive failure at this point.
