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.
It says more about the PR campaign than the people.
In Germany the app was developed by research institutes. Then canceled. Then SAP picked it up and charged 10 million Euros for what is essentially a few 1000 lines of UI code. The German Telekom got the same amount, just „because“ and will additionally charge 2-3 million per month mostly for the hotline (with limited capacity). So the total cost will be 50-100 millions. Despite the fact that most technical work was a…
Nope, it's not 1000 lines of UI code. It is a project with lots of pressure (timeline, politics, ...) and two years of maintenance. Including two apps (iOS and Android) multiple Backend systems and a concept, project management (coordination between government, testing laboratories, ...) looking at the team size (educated guess based on GitHub stats) the hourly rate is on the higher side, but it's still low for a government contract and in case it has effect (which is still not proven) peanuts compared to the financial cost of COVID.
Where has a contact tracing app been successfully deployed at a large scale? Have those places seen any positive effect? Apple/Google's APIs were widely discussed a couple months ago, but (at least in the US) it seems to have fallen off everyone's radar.
The problem with contact tracing apps is that their effectiveness has a quadratic relation with the adoption rate. They would be mostly useful to trace "random" contacts (since you tend to know which of your friends and family you saw within the last 2 weeks), but to be able to trace a possible infection both the infected and the "recipient" have to have the app and active. In Germany they said their 12M installs is "good" but that's just 15% of the population, so if you'd take a random pair the chance to detect a link is 0.15*0.15 = 2.25% ... so it's obvious that this isn't going to move the needle much. So in order for this to be effective, you need to have very high adoption rates, and it can only help in addition to other measures (wearing masks, hygene, avoiding indoor gatherings, ...)
In Germany the app was developed by research institutes. Then canceled. Then SAP picked it up and charged 10 million Euros for what is essentially a few 1000 lines of UI code. The German Telekom got the same amount, just „because“ and will additionally charge 2-3 million per month mostly for the hotline (with limited capacity). So the total cost will be 50-100 millions. Despite the fact that most technical work was a…
Nope, it's not 1000 lines of UI code. It is a project with lots of pressure (timeline, politics, ...) and two years of maintenance. Including two apps (iOS and Android) multiple Backend systems and a concept, project management (coordination between government, testing laboratories, ...) looking at the team size (educated guess based on GitHub stats) the hourly rate is on the higher side, but it's still low for a gov…
I said a few 1000 and I actually browsed the code on Github when it came out.
There were just six weeks to develop it.
And the concepts where developed before by public research institutes for a tiny fraction of that price (not included).
(If you insist, here is a small calculation. Let‘s say we charge a whopping 500 Euros per hour per engineer. In other words an engineer that costs 1 million per year. And we have 6 weeks time which was all they had. And let’s take 20 people for that. And let‘s add 500.000 for some overhead. Then that‘s still just about 3 million. And I‘ve used insane numbers for a product that trivial.)
Where has a contact tracing app been successfully deployed at a large scale? Have those places seen any positive effect? Apple/Google's APIs were widely discussed a couple months ago, but (at least in the US) it seems to have fallen off everyone's radar.
South Korea has nationwide contact tracing that's been quite successful.
Where has a contact tracing app been successfully deployed at a large scale? Have those places seen any positive effect? Apple/Google's APIs were widely discussed a couple months ago, but (at least in the US) it seems to have fallen off everyone's radar.
The problem with contact tracing apps is that their effectiveness has a quadratic relation with the adoption rate. They would be mostly useful to trace "random" contacts (since you tend to know which of your friends and family you saw within the last 2 weeks), but to be able to trace a possible infection both the infected and the "recipient" have to have the app and active. In Germany they said their 12M installs is…
The other problem is which people are likely to install the app. It basically requires a modern Android or iOS smartphone with internet connectivity, which probably excludes the really at-risk groups that are of most concern: https://www.dw.com/en/loved-or-loathed-how-germanys-coronavi...
In Germany the app was developed by research institutes. Then canceled. Then SAP picked it up and charged 10 million Euros for what is essentially a few 1000 lines of UI code. The German Telekom got the same amount, just „because“ and will additionally charge 2-3 million per month mostly for the hotline (with limited capacity). So the total cost will be 50-100 millions. Despite the fact that most technical work was a…
Nope, it's not 1000 lines of UI code. It is a project with lots of pressure (timeline, politics, ...) and two years of maintenance. Including two apps (iOS and Android) multiple Backend systems and a concept, project management (coordination between government, testing laboratories, ...) looking at the team size (educated guess based on GitHub stats) the hourly rate is on the higher side, but it's still low for a gov…
Peanuts compared to the cost of COVID? How is that a valid measure?
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?
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.
Nope, it's not 1000 lines of UI code. It is a project with lots of pressure (timeline, politics, ...) and two years of maintenance. Including two apps (iOS and Android) multiple Backend systems and a concept, project management (coordination between government, testing laboratories, ...) looking at the team size (educated guess based on GitHub stats) the hourly rate is on the higher side, but it's still low for a gov…
I said a few 1000 and I actually browsed the code on Github when it came out. There were just six weeks to develop it. And the concepts where developed before by public research institutes for a tiny fraction of that price (not included). (If you insist, here is a small calculation. Let‘s say we charge a whopping 500 Euros per hour per engineer. In other words an engineer that costs 1 million per year. And we have 6…
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.