[tlarkworthy]

20M for the boost of Germany's worldwide status is a drop in the ocean. The money was well spent, Germany did not embarrass themselves by penny pinching. It needed to work, and it appears to. Compare this to the UK who is still flapping around.

[quonn]

It doesn‘t work great. I actually run it on my phone. It has silly bugs, despite the simplicity.

Additionally, for that price you could have easily have 3 independent teams develop it and take the best one and still be cheaper and better.

I hope someone will challenge this in court. I don‘t think they can get away without a call for bids which should have been done (across Europe, as the law requires).

[johannes1234321]

Yes it has bugs, but most bugs are from the system framework ... they could have handled those better, but the cause is often out of their control

[rkachowski]

In what sense are most of the bugs from the "system framework"?

[johannes1234321]

There is this contact tracing framework in iOS and Google Play Services and that causes a few errors. Some users get a message like "not possible in your region" and some get some random error codes about rate limits and such errors, which bubble up from those frameworks and can only be fixed there.

[quonn]

Yeah. It‘s the framework which does pretty much all of the interesting technical work, if I may say so. It does the communication with other phones and determines if there was a contact and generates, stores and maintains the tokens and given the server data figures out matches and so on. It has a tiny, simple to use API on top.

It was jointly developed by Apple and Google. For free.

[rkachowski]

That's what I thought, it seems that the entire project is basically a fancy wrapper around the Exposure Notification apis provided by Apple and Google.

There's some kind of cognitive dissonance around your idea that these companies deserve so much compensation for designing a solution that relies so heavily (entirely) on these features, and yet be free from responsibility for serious bugs that arise from this decision.

[riffraff]

I mean, if there was a public tender there's little to complain, if there wasn't then it seems right to, even if it's "a drop in the ocean".

And frankly nobody thinks "wow, Germany has a working COVID app" since almost everyone else has it too. Even Italy, amongst a ton of screw ups, has managed to produce a perfectly fine open source contact tracing app.

[tlarkworthy]

Many do not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps#List_of_countrie...

US, UK, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Chile, Belgium, Sweden are significantly affected countries without one.

I don't expect Germany to get a wow, only abscense of negative press.

[johannes1234321]

> And frankly nobody thinks "wow, Germany has a working COVID app"

Small exchange from the British Parliament: https://youtu.be/atAy8NGOoiw

[patentatt]

Yeah, I don’t get all these people criticizing the cost. Also, when a government is dealing with a flagship corporation of their country, cost is a secondary or tertiary concern anyways. It’s a subsidy in part, and it’s also just that $10m for a nation state government to get it right the first time is just so so so inexpensive. I think SAP let them off easy this time, if anything.

[quonn]

> It‘s a subsidy in part

An illegal subsidy. Public contracts require a bidding process, usually across Europe.

It‘s unfair that smaller companies don‘t get a chance.

I reject the idea that Germany should prop up its biggest companies, excluding what really is the backbone of the German economy (which works very differently from the US one) and also excluding our partners across all of Europe.

[_Wintermute]

I think the UK's decision to switch to Google and Apple's framework was actually the right decision, although it's all rather moot and a waste of money as I can't see any contact tracing app work if nobody downloads it (see France).