COCOA

~ the goodbye ~

COCOA went live at three in the afternoon on 19 June 2020, and the ministry that published it said up front that the first month or so was a trial and the design would keep changing. It stood for COVID-19 Contact-Confirming Application, which is the sort of acronym a government arrives at by working backward from a word it already liked. The app used Bluetooth to notice when two phones had been near each other for long enough to matter, and if one of those people later registered a positive test, the other one got told.

The working code came from outside the government entirely. It was built by COVID-19 Radar Japan, a volunteer community of private-sector engineers, some of them Microsoft employees in Japan, who had built an exposure-notification app in the open because nobody official was moving fast enough. The government adopted their work. That origin story was reported warmly in mid-2020 and it became a much harder thing to talk about later, when the volunteers were still associated with an app whose maintenance had passed to people they did not control.

Turkey ran its own version of this, and mine was called Hayat Eve Sığar. It generated a code you showed at the door of a shopping center or handed over to board an intercity bus, and for a stretch of 2020 and 2021 that code was a condition of moving around the country, so the question of whether people would voluntarily install a tracing app never came up here the way it did in Japan. COCOA was opt-in and had no gate attached to it. Forty-one million people installed it anyway, in a country of a hundred and twenty-five million, which by the standards of voluntary uptake was a real number.

About five million of those downloads had already landed by early July 2020, two weeks in. By September 2022 the digital minister, Tarō Kōno, was telling a press conference that the need for this kind of monitoring had fallen a long way from where it was two years earlier, and that COCOA would be wound up.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the four silent months ~

The defect is the part everybody in Japan remembers. An update shipped around the end of September 2020 and broke exposure notifications on Android, completely. Not intermittently, not for some handsets. If you were an Android user who had been near a person who later registered positive, the app knew and told you nothing, and it went on telling you nothing until developers finished a fix in February 2021.

Android was roughly a third of the install base. For those four months a very large number of people carried an app they believed was watching for exposure on their behalf, and it was doing the watching and swallowing the result. The health ministry took the blame publicly, and later reviews picked at how a government could ship a public-health tool with no testing regime capable of catching a total failure of its single function.

Nothing after that landed cleanly. An opt-in public-health app runs on trust, and from February 2021 onward every release note was read by people who already knew the app had gone quiet on a third of its users for a season.

~ the last update ~

Version 3.0.0 began rolling out on 17 November 2022. It was a feature-stop build, an update whose entire job was to disable the app and tell you to delete it. iPhone users could take it immediately. Android users could not get it for several days after that, which is a small and very fitting last detail.

The numbers at the end: approximately 41.17 million downloads across two years and five months, and 3.69 million positive registrations as of 11 November 2022. The government put the closure down to a policy change rather than to the bug. Japan had moved away from reporting every individual case, and an app that depends on positive people registering themselves loses its input the moment that stops.

The Digital Agency published a comprehensive report on 31 March 2023 with data analysis and user survey results from the final version, on the premise that the next pandemic deserves better tooling than this one got. A postmortem is more than most dead government software receives.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »