Not sure where you get the 1000 lines from. That's ridiculous. `cloc` counts 16k lines of Kotlin for the Android app and 22k lines of Swift for the iOS app. That does not even include other aspects like the server side code or support documentation. Also it's not only the app that had to be build: It required all the notification infrastructure and coordination to deliver test result to the app. This is really one of the very few big government projects where I can't really complain about the costs. There was only one attempt at getting this done right and in time. They managed both.
You're right that the parent comment is exaggerating, but 20 million for a project of this size is still a bit crazy. The same app cost Austria "only" 2 or 3 million, IIRC.
Plus, I just don't understand all the NIH. Why isn't this kind of stuff being developed in one place and then forked by the respective countries instead of everyone creating their own tiny island?
That said, I don't have any major gripes with how the code turned out, just with the cost.
Yep, am positively surprised how the product turned out. Plus the launch also went well I think, including a comic manual and even an AMA on reddit; I didn't read of any glitches or anything bad either.
I really can’t understand this for a COVID-19 contact tracing app. You should find out how to give feedback on this to make them change availability to global.
It boggles my mind that I have to remind many app publishers that we live in a globalized world and that it’s a natter of a few minutes work to just select the countries to make the app available in. More so for free apps where the publisher doesn’t have to worry about taxes and payments.
Even for apps that are not localized to English or other languages, the publishers should prefer to get them out to as many people as possible in the whole wide world who may be visiting or on a long stay in a specific country.
In this case, the app developer can surely include help text that explains where the app is meant to be used or would be useful (it’s also not like people with a German App Store account living in some other country would be able to use this app effectively).
Many times it has happens due legal restrictions that developer has in place in his org . It is worse when the publisher is a government body or contracted by one
Sadly, no. It's been left to the states, and almost none of the states are planning on using apps[0].
This boggles my mind. Sure, it will take a reasonable effort to get widespread use of these apps. But the impact would be huge. Even low rates of app use have a real chance of lowering the reproduction rate significantly, and reasonably broad usage bring it less than 1.0.
The technology is designed in the right way, where anonymous data is being collected with no app required. People can download the app right after they get a positive test and report themselves positive retroactively. Same on the other side, you can download the app and know how much contact you've had with positive cases retroactively.
I'm no longer surprised the US federal government is doing nothing to push this. But I expected more out of the states.
Where I come from (.au) we paid Boston Consulting $8mil to copy/paste the source code from the Singapore governments open sourced implementation.
The government was then talking it up with "If enough people download the app, we'll let you go to football games again!!!"
Current media reports say none of our local health departments have found _any_ contacts using it that they hadn't already found via manual contact tracing.
(I think 100 apps+backends for $10mil is a bit optimistic, if those backends are required to be HA and support a significant percentage of a countries population. As a single datapoint, where I work has many iOS+Android+backend app projects for gov departments that serve tens to hundreds of thousands of users that cost them high 5 or low 6 figures plus 4 figures a month support/hosting, but if they wanted me to support the 60% of the population (~15mil users) that our CovidSafe app was targeting it'd most likely come to more like mid to high 6 figures, and certainly 5 figures a month to host/support it. So I'd have said maybe 20 apps realistically for that price. Still just as fraudulent a rorting of taxpayer money though...)
I honestly think this will be a net loss financially for SAP and Telekom. To get it done so quickly in parallel to the contact tracing API being just developed will have required a team of their best developers. The lost opportunity cost for this alone will be huge. Then it is not just development, but also QA, community management (git hub issues are in the hundreds), legal, project management, etc. I think the primary reason SAP and Telekom even offered to participated at all was political pressure.
The loss in public reputation if they had failed was not worth even participating.
Also, having worked in a corporate setting would have told you that you can't launch anything for less than 1m EUR/USD, can't launch two things for less than 5m and 3 for less than 20m.
I do work in a corporate setting and have done so, as a consultant, for years. I know the numbers very well, both from what I and others charge and what large companies actually budget.
If you would look at what the app actually has to do to „handle the pandemic“ you‘d find most apps would be more complex.
Same for what you call concurrent users. Those users have no identity at all and essentially need to anonymously download a bunch of static files which are the same for everyone from a bucket periodically. Put a CDN in front. Done.
Infrastructure for the one we have here in .au, which started out as a copy/paste from the .sg opentrace app's git repo, is minuscule.
The only backend touches that apps do is a few login/register APIs when you first launch it, and if you ever test positive and agree to send your data it sends a big json blob to an AWS Lambda nodejs function that pretty much just uploads the json to S3.
I don't recall how complex the login/register stuff is, but I don't remember thinking "That's gonna need heroics to register 10 or 20 million users quickly" when reviewing the code.
Simpler really. No need to get the Facebook SDK, DoubleClick SDK, and Cambridge Analytics plugins set up and configured with your payment details correct and tested...
(And the MSS/GRU/NSA/Mossad will all insert their code into your app bundles without you needing to do anything...)
