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Comment by papower | Hacker News Reader

The "worlds most famous" claim is from the website and not the poster

I wasn't sure whether to remove that as a gratuitous adjective. Even without that claim, it's an interesting development, especially as the app cost only €850k.

In contrast, our nearest neighbour scrapped their app last month after spending over £11MM (~€12MM) and are now rebuilding on the Apple/Google API: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53095336

The code is already up on GitHub: https://github.com/HSEIreland

I wouldn't put the focus on it being ONLY 850k, that seems a competent price, I would really like to know how in the world they spent 11M on the uk one...

this is the first I have learned about its price, and I will say- that seems about right given the resources.

That’s like 4 SV devs working a year.

And just in salaries, not including payroll taxes, office space, admins, QAs, etc.

850k sounds eminently reasonable for such an undertaking in such a short period of time.

That's what I'm saying, it's the 11M that's not reasonable...

I wasn't intending on disputing your statement but merely adding to it. Apologies if it came across that way.

We had a team of great devs and designers who worked on this. What most would consider “par for the course” in relation to an MVP startup for instance.

I don’t know specifics about the UK version, but most of those costs likely weren’t on the app proper. They did run a field test, for example.

For comparison, the German version cost millions, too. That included multi-language support, setting up help lines, security evaluation, load testing millions of concurrent users and, IIRC, connecting to quite a few of different hospital computer systems.

Add in time pressure, and costs go up. Germany did get a quality system, judging by what the spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club said (paraphrasing: ‘we have the unfamiliar problem that there is so little to complain about’. They never endorse stuff, so that’s about as endorsing as their statements can get)

It also includes the DPIA, which in itself can be an expensive process. There was a lot of concern/press in Ireland pre-release about the privacy implications of the app. It's hot on the heels of a "mandatory but not compulsory" national ID card fiasco that was determined to be unlawful by the privacy regulator last year: https://www.thejournal.ie/psc-no-legal-basis-4766822-Aug2019...

You’re not wrong.

We ran a field test too. But again; I probably can’t talk about that much. Sorry. If you have more in depth technical questions I might be able to answer them.

I worked on this project a bit and have a deep understanding of how it went about, though, I am not sure how much I can talk about that.

edit: I guess what can be said was it was a highly efficient project, and there weren't so many fingers in the development pot so to say.

Is this HN-speak for "it was a clusterfuck and there were too many stakeholders with incompatible requirements"?

It sounded like the opposite of what you wrote.

Yes, but given the previous phrase:

> I am not sure how much I can talk about that

it genuinely seemed like it might be a way to list the problems without saying that there were problems.

I'm sorry that it seemed like I'm attacking the GP. I did not intend to, but I also knowingly ignored this interpretation, because wording is hard

I didn’t mean it that way, I’m just not sure how much I could talk about it. For one, because I was involved but only so much. And two, because it’s not really my thing to talk about per se.

As for problems, not really any problems. It was quite straight forward. I’m just not sure my company would appreciate me speaking on their behalf about details.

Edit: but I can answer like, general technical details and things like that.

You can check the GitHub but it looks like there were only a max of 3 devs involved https://github.com/hseireland/

That isn’t exactly accurate but yeah- it was the work of just a few. Some of us were brought in to help with certain details.

Edit: the github history here is what probably happened after they cleaned it up and open sourced it. Which isn’t uncommon I think.

To add on, these core 3 people really were the folks who did majority of the work.

Thanks for working on this.

Appreciated, I did very small bits.

It says worlds most successful, which I presume is referring to the fact that nearly 30% of the population with compatible devices have downloaded it.

EDIT: added the 'with compatabile devices' disclaimer

That’s a little misleading though because the percentage of people who install the country’s contact tracing app is driven much more by the quality of the people than the quality of the app. So this app might be garbage, I don’t think this statistic says much one way or the other.

> the percentage of people who install the country’s contact tracing app is driven much more by the quality of the people

That sounds strange. Explain more?

You could write the cleanest, most bug-free and user-friendly app, release it in the US, and likely never see this level of adoption (I believe is the point that is being made here).

So far it seems like a given country/jurisdiction standardizes on one app for everyone to use. (In theory, apps could be interoperable, but I don't know of this having happened.)

So, the citizens' choice isn't between one app and another app. It is only whether or not to use the app that has been chosen for them.

Therefore, their choice doesn't tell you much about the quality of the app. The primary driver of the decision is whether or not they're willing to take steps to fight the disease.

It's similar to being served dinner on an airplane with only one meal option. They bring you the food, and you either eat it or you don't. The choice doesn't tell you much about whether the food was good. It's more of a reflection of whether you were hungry. The only thing it tells you about food quality is that it (if you eat it) it was somewhere between barely acceptable and excellent.

> The primary driver of the decision is whether or not they're willing to take steps to fight the disease.

Here in Australia, our gov is extremely incompetent at delivering successful IT projects. They also have a terrible track record with securing data, scaling services (eg national-level IT outages), don't admit to mistakes, etc. :(

> It's more of a reflection of whether you were hungry.

No. To go with your example, if you know the people preparing the meal are incompetent, don't follow anything like reasonable hygiene standards, have previously caused significant outbreaks of disease themselves, and each time they're caught they promise to do better (but actually don't do so)... would you eat something they've prepared for you? Especially prepared at short notice where corner-cutting is expected? ;)

Trying to say that only idiots (etc) wouldn't install such an application is seriously wrong. ;)

It's an unjustified claim and a little demeaning, but not obviously wrong. But citizens choosing to believe in the effectiveness of digital contact tracing is a far larger variable in the success of these apps than the quality of the app itself.

I think it's more about public trust in the app than anything else. Nearform, and the government, were quite effective in establishing public trust; I think it helped that it was open source.

There's still a fair amount of people that are suspect that the published binary doesn't match the source and the app could be doing nefarious things. It will be interesting to see how this sentiment progresses. Reproducible builds would help in this regard.

Really, I work in the industry (it) and haven't known one person to raise this.

I would say the majority of people in Ireland know the various social network apps are a bajillion times more intrusive than the covid checker. Im fairly sure most people "trust" the government not to be "spying" on us

It says more about the PR campaign than the people.

That's around 1.5 million downloads.

Meanwhile, Play Store says India's Covid tracing app was downloaded by more than 100 million+ people.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nic.goi.aarogy...

An app with a higher percentage of the population enrolled is probably more successful than sheer numbers in this case.

With these things, you're really trying to get saturation (I think it's usually estimated that they need to get to about 60% adoption to be very useful), so in that context 1.5 million downloads in Ireland is more successful than 100m in India (though neither is good enough).

Makes sense.

There's roughly about 1.3M downloads out of an adult population of 3.7M people, so about 35% of the eligible population.

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