COVIDSafe

» see covidsafe.gov.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

COVIDSafe launched on 26 April 2020 into the most favorable conditions any government app has ever had. A million Australians installed it in the first 24 hours. By the middle of May it was on 5.7 million phones, close to a quarter of the country, without anyone needing to be persuaded that it mattered.

The design was borrowed. It ran on BlueTrace, the protocol Singapore had published with its TraceTogether app, where phones exchange anonymous tokens over Bluetooth and the registry of who was near whom is only unpacked when somebody tests positive and agrees to hand it over. Australia's version added a central store, the National COVIDSafe Data Store, sitting on Amazon infrastructure.

It did not work, and the reason was mundane. Bluetooth handshakes between phones in pockets are much harder than they sound, especially on iOS, where versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the app did not scan for other devices at all once backgrounded. A separate bug stopped locked iPhones from picking up new temporary IDs until an update in June 2020. For the months when the app had its enormous installed base and Australia had actual community transmission, half the phones carrying it were not doing the one job it had.

On 10 August 2022 the incoming Albanese government announced the app was finished, with the health minister calling it a "failed app". It was formally decommissioned on 16 August and the data store was emptied.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the arithmetic ~

Over its life COVIDSafe cost more than A$21 million. Roughly $10 million of that went on building the thing and about $7 million on advertising it, which is a ratio worth sitting with. The remainder covered maintenance and staff at around $100,000 a month.

Against that it identified 17 close contacts nationally that manual contact tracers had not already found, and of those, two were confirmed cases. In one six-month stretch it produced two close contacts in total. The advertising budget alone was about three and a half million dollars per unique case detected.

~ the number nobody talks about ~

7.9 million people registered. Fewer than 800 ever consented to their contact data being uploaded to the National COVIDSafe Data Store after a positive test.

That gap is the real story of the app, and it is a question of consent design rather than of engineering. COVIDSafe only produced anything at the moment a diagnosed person actively agreed to release what their phone had collected. In practice that meant a stranger from a health department calling while you felt terrible and asking you to tap through a flow you had installed two years earlier and never opened once.

~ the part that was not the app's fault ~

Australia's manual contact tracing was good. State health departments had the staff and the paper trail from hotel quarantine, and they were finding contacts quickly. An app earns its place by catching the encounters humans cannot reconstruct, the stranger on the tram, and that is exactly the category Bluetooth handled worst.

Apple and Google shipped their own exposure notification framework in May 2020, with proper background Bluetooth access on both platforms, and most countries eventually moved onto it. Australia had committed to a centralized data store before that existed and stayed with it to the end.

~ how this looked from here ~

Turkey ran the other experiment. HES kodu was a code you had to produce to board a plane or an intercity bus, checked at the door by a person whose job was to look at it. Adoption was never the issue, because adoption was not optional, and the privacy argument that dominated the Australian rollout barely got started here.

Both approaches now sit in the same category of thing we built in a hurry in 2020 and switched off without ceremony. Australia's cost twenty one million dollars and found two cases. Turkey's worked, in the narrow sense that everyone used it, which raises a question about what "worked" was supposed to mean.

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