[markdown]

$10M for two mobile apps, some server side code, and docs? And you're defending this as if it's reasonable?

One could build 100 apps with server code and docs with that money, and still have a few million left over for hookers and blow.

Stop defending corruption.

[bigiain]

Where I come from (.au) we paid Boston Consulting $8mil to copy/paste the source code from the Singapore governments open sourced implementation.

The government was then talking it up with "If enough people download the app, we'll let you go to football games again!!!"

Current media reports say none of our local health departments have found _any_ contacts using it that they hadn't already found via manual contact tracing.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-15/coronavirus-app-limit...

(I think 100 apps+backends for $10mil is a bit optimistic, if those backends are required to be HA and support a significant percentage of a countries population. As a single datapoint, where I work has many iOS+Android+backend app projects for gov departments that serve tens to hundreds of thousands of users that cost them high 5 or low 6 figures plus 4 figures a month support/hosting, but if they wanted me to support the 60% of the population (~15mil users) that our CovidSafe app was targeting it'd most likely come to more like mid to high 6 figures, and certainly 5 figures a month to host/support it. So I'd have said maybe 20 apps realistically for that price. Still just as fraudulent a rorting of taxpayer money though...)

[oezi]

I honestly think this will be a net loss financially for SAP and Telekom. To get it done so quickly in parallel to the contact tracing API being just developed will have required a team of their best developers. The lost opportunity cost for this alone will be huge. Then it is not just development, but also QA, community management (git hub issues are in the hundreds), legal, project management, etc. I think the primary reason SAP and Telekom even offered to participated at all was political pressure.

The loss in public reputation if they had failed was not worth even participating.

Also, having worked in a corporate setting would have told you that you can't launch anything for less than 1m EUR/USD, can't launch two things for less than 5m and 3 for less than 20m.

20m really is a laughable sum.

[quonn]

I do work in a corporate setting and have done so, as a consultant, for years. I know the numbers very well, both from what I and others charge and what large companies actually budget.

[tester756]

>One could build 100 apps with server code and docs with that money, and still have a few million left over for hookers and blow.

100 random apps or app that have to handle pandemic in country?

Also what about support and infrastructure to handle those milions of concurrent users

[quonn]

If you would look at what the app actually has to do to „handle the pandemic“ you‘d find most apps would be more complex.

Same for what you call concurrent users. Those users have no identity at all and essentially need to anonymously download a bunch of static files which are the same for everyone from a bucket periodically. Put a CDN in front. Done.

[bigiain]

Infrastructure for the one we have here in .au, which started out as a copy/paste from the .sg opentrace app's git repo, is minuscule.

The only backend touches that apps do is a few login/register APIs when you first launch it, and if you ever test positive and agree to send your data it sends a big json blob to an AWS Lambda nodejs function that pretty much just uploads the json to S3.

I don't recall how complex the login/register stuff is, but I don't remember thinking "That's gonna need heroics to register 10 or 20 million users quickly" when reviewing the code.

(If you wanna go look yourself, try here: https://github.com/opentrace-community )

[markdown]

> 100 random apps or app that have to handle pandemic in country?

The contract tracing apps are really basic... a step above torch apps.

[bigiain]

Simpler really. No need to get the Facebook SDK, DoubleClick SDK, and Cambridge Analytics plugins set up and configured with your payment details correct and tested...

(And the MSS/GRU/NSA/Mossad will all insert their code into your app bundles without you needing to do anything...)