Reply to: Will you download the app?

[darmstadt]

Still not quite world beating: Fault in NHS Covid app meant thousands at risk did not quarantine | World news | The Guardian

[darmstadt]

Germany is helping the UK develop its COVID-19 contact-tracing app, says ambassador • The Register

I've seen the documentation that the Germans sent, it's basically 12 sentences:

git clone https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android.git
...

and so on for the other 11 repositories....

[BR14]

[Old Greg]

Then people (you know who you are) wouldn't have to buy Chinese phones anymore and even better, it would be 6G...

6G will be responsible for the final zombie apocalypse. You heard it here first.

[darmstadt]

It's a shame they gave up. They could have got Clive Sinclair to develop a new world-beating BritPhone that the world-beating app would work on.

Then people (you know who you are) wouldn't have to buy Chinese phones anymore and even better, it would be 6G...

[Old Greg]

It's a shame they gave up. They could have got Clive Sinclair to develop a new world-beating BritPhone that the world-beating app would work on.

[darmstadt]

[Old Greg]

It was widely known and reported (e.g. here) that the NHS in-house App was not going to function as claimed.
Testing something that could potentially work is obviously important, but testing something that could never actually work was a complete waste of time and money, and has made the government look like idiots. It's difficult to blame the media on this one (for a change).
Whoever was advising them on the technical side needs a large

There is a real risk of SHTF with a second surge coinciding with flu season. The summer should have been an opportunity to get contact tracing efficient, effective and fully deployed, which has technical, operational and cultural factors. The delays do not help with managing the risk.

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Any iOS developer who has worked with Bluetooth could have told them that the app was unlikely to work reliably in the background due to the limitations and throttling in place for background Bluetooth apps.

I was able to put together a test app that proves this using an Apple sample code project. Not sure it was warranted to spend £500k on a full blown proof of concept. The right thing to do would have been to switch to the decentralised model using the Apple and Google API as soon as it was announced.

The government claims they’ve devised a better algorithm than Apple/Google for determining proximity but I’m very skeptical of this. Let them publish a technical paper explaining how. They have access to the same limited data that the Apple/Google APIs do - they collect the device TX power, a time series of RSSI values and they also capture your device model and OS during registration. That’s it.

Bluetooth proximity is unreliable and this will be the case with Apple/Google too.

[Mordac]

I think it was right to investigate other options before blindly accepting the Apple/Google offering. You can mutter till the cows come home over whether the right approach was taken - as is typical of tech projects, ask three people their thoughts and you'll get five opinions.

A pilot was absolutely the right thing to do; why roll out a product developed at speed without real world testing? Can you imagine the uproar that would have ensued if they went straight to live and some tech journo found a bug?

They've actually followed good project protocol by building something, testing it, and halting when it didn't work. How many other government tech projects have you seen where they just keep chucking money at it even though it's crap?

The main issue, is HMG/NHS overselling the app and the media forever being hungry to nit pick and leap upon any news as evidence of whatever agenda they want to push.

It was widely known and reported (e.g. here) that the NHS in-house App was not going to function as claimed.
Testing something that could potentially work is obviously important, but testing something that could never actually work was a complete waste of time and money, and has made the government look like idiots. It's difficult to blame the media on this one (for a change).
Whoever was advising them on the technical side needs a large

[Old Greg]

I think it was right to investigate other options before blindly accepting the Apple/Google offering. You can mutter till the cows come home over whether the right approach was taken - as is typical of tech projects, ask three people their thoughts and you'll get five opinions.

A pilot was absolutely the right thing to do; why roll out a product developed at speed without real world testing? Can you imagine the uproar that would have ensued if they went straight to live and some tech journo found a bug?

They've actually followed good project protocol by building something, testing it, and halting when it didn't work. How many other government tech projects have you seen where they just keep chucking money at it even though it's crap?

The main issue, is HMG/NHS overselling the app and the media forever being hungry to nit pick and leap upon any news as evidence of whatever agenda they want to push.

Maybe the agenda is holding the government accountable for its shortcomings during the pandemic.

[ladymuck]

I think it was right to investigate other options before blindly accepting the Apple/Google offering. You can mutter till the cows come home over whether the right approach was taken - as is typical of tech projects, ask three people their thoughts and you'll get five opinions.

A pilot was absolutely the right thing to do; why roll out a product developed at speed without real world testing? Can you imagine the uproar that would have ensued if they went straight to live and some tech journo found a bug?

They've actually followed good project protocol by building something, testing it, and halting when it didn't work. How many other government tech projects have you seen where they just keep chucking money at it even though it's crap?

The main issue, is HMG/NHS overselling the app and the media forever being hungry to nit pick and leap upon any news as evidence of whatever agenda they want to push.

[LondonManc]

"If all you illegal immigrants could just download the app so we'll have a chance of finding you please."

[Scruff]

I would LOVE to see the the government provided fag packet that the requirements were written on. I'll bet that there was a lot of white space there...

Same as CEST - I wonder if the Track & Trace Team have also destroyed their Test Data History?

[cojak]

Serco didn't develop the app, they had the contract for the wider test and trace program though. The apps themselves were developed by VMWare Pivotal Labs.

I would LOVE to see the the government provided fag packet that the requirements were written on. I'll bet that there was a lot of white space there...