How Digital Is Germany?

In the end, perhaps digitalisation saves me from visiting an office in person, but the processes are still painfully slow and opaque. You still fire off PDFs into the void. There is rarely any prevalidation of your documents, so there can be a 6-week lag between the submission and the validation. People are terrified of making mistakes, especially because each case worker makes their own rule. During that time you can't inquire about the status of your application, or even refer to it when adding more documents. It's a far cry from a proper ticketing system.

One other thing I did not see: using your ID for authentication is ridiculously complicated and confusing. Nobody does it unless they're forced to. Immigrants are often left without a valid ID for months, again because of delays in processing time.