[1]: https://fragdenstaat.de/anfrage/kostenaufstellung-der-corona...
I frequently find myself pondering this whenever my government announces yet another contract for (the admittedly decent) IT services for interacting with state entities.
In any big organization, it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, meaning that it's better to build it first, prove that it works and then seek to establish it as a standard, than vice versa. And if there are multiple competing proposals, then competition is healthy.
Do all countries have the same commitment to privacy? No. Are all countries willing to work within the limitations imposed by Apple/Google? No. Disagreement is natural and it would be pretty stupid for everyone to stand still until an agreement is reached.
Besides, 20 million euro for a country like Germany is peanuts. All EU countries have spent far more than that during the lockdown.
It would actually be quite interesting to compare the different apps and their philosophies (privacy, security, centralization vs. decentralization, open vs. closed source, source code..).
Also, the app would have to be translated in many more languages. If you don’t want that to increase time to market, it will cost a lot of money.
I am actually curious, because on the other hand you would have all the constraints like development in less than 3 months, need for the app to be waterproof in a legal sense (data protection), additional backend development and also development for both iOS and Android.
maybe they can build a toy version, like everyone else.
All of that costs a lot of money if you want to bring it to this level of polish.
This cannot be overstated and is generally underestimated by developers. Setting up a hotline infrastructure (actually it's two hotlines, one which is more like a helpdesk for customers of the app and one for the lab stuff) and operating it produces significant initial and ongoing cost.
Also they will still have additional ongoing cost for infrastructure (server operation, traffic) and cost for support regarding the still-to-be-performed process of interfacing the lab information systems of the 140-or-so labs in Germany with the Corona App Backend infrastructure (which is necessary to allow for the lab hotline and TAN stuff to become replaced by direct transmission of test results to the user via the app and its backend).
If those operating costs even just for the near/foreseeable future are included in the 20M€, I consider that a fair sum.
The efforts are definitely not free, but the price is entirely disconnected from the service provided. It is just the result of the usual enterprise companies that handle government contracts.
Such grotesque waste of tax-payer money should be made illegal, but the fact that these companies keep getting contracts is unfortunately reinforced by absurd government processes.
If we start just with development, we see that the the Github organization has 30 members. Unfortunately, the companies had absolutely horrendous source control and open source workflow practices (e.g. the android app's first commit is 35k lines), so we don't have a good history of all contributors, so for good measure let's double that to get an absurdly large team of 60 developers.
Considering the pandemic, let's say they all started working on the project in January. That means that the cost of the software developers themselves is approx 30 manyears, or 3 million EUR.
Translated the limited content and creating the webpages are not very expensive, but let's allocate a whopping ~100k EUR for that.
We need negotiation, design and security validation as well. Let's give that 5 people, 2 months at 4 times the already expensive senior developer salary. Expensive as hell, for no good reason, apart from to cover absurdities. ~200k EUR.
All these numbers are absurdly high (i.e. room for large errors), and we're "only" at 3.3 million EUR in cost. Need to add some profit margin for the company, but with more data (e.g. actual developers it took, how long they worked) the estimate could probably be pushed much lower.
Depending on how realistically they did that, that can be costly.
If this system stays up on its first day of use, 20 million might be worth it.
Because the alternative is that you're terrible at math.
According to[0], the costs of the pandemic for the German economy are from 255 to 729 billion euros. Taking the middle of 500 billion as a best guess, and a quick division will tell us that this app will be worth it if it stops one in every 25,000 infections.
Or, alternatively: this app costs about 0.25€ for every citizen, or about a quarter of one mask. That does not strike me as a terrible deal.
The point here isn't that this is a model for how all government procurement should be run. It is not.
It's that under the specific circumstances, overpaying is completely acceptable if it meant, for example, getting a contract signed a day earlier. Note that situation was obviously far worse when this project started than it is now.
[0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
Paying students €500 a month as emergency help will cost hundreds of millions and this is a single miniscule effort in a package of several hundred BILLION Euros.
Discussing the cost of this app with the given circumstances is a complete waste of time. It's a literal rounding error in the overall Corona bill for Germany alone.
And yes, the link is just the result of some hyperactive copy&paste.
I'll now try to enjoy the thought that the Germans are bickering about the price of this on HN. It's sort of a return to normalcy: the luxury of caring about pointless details precisely because the government isn't quite as incompetent as always assumed, at least compared to some others.
The well of criticism is endless. There are voices arguing that masks are useless, that 'Churchill wouldn't wear one' and that 'social distancing is communism'. Dealing with all of them will result in brain damage.
For a government project that is cheap! (25cent per citizen)
Edit: source for the 374 is the table on https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesundheitsamt
Edit: 600 million, source: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/corona-krise-jens...
To be fair the backend, while developed by Bending Spoon, is operated by the government, while the 20M€ from the German government might also include operation? But still
Sooner or later there will probably come auto-translated captions.