In Finland, the authorities reserved 6M to create a contact tracing app and all support systems. They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year.
Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government.
Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex? Based on either citizens' adoption or UX, is it anywhere near as successful?
Built by a small, Agile company, although not by a startup by any classification.
>Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex?
That's irrelevant when it comes to spending. The cost of something is always proportional to how much the customer(here the German government, read the taxpayer) is willing to spend not how complex the project is. While it might not be more complicated to implement than in Finland, the German government has more money than the Finish government so it was billed(read fleeced) accordingly.
It's like asking "Are SV engineer really 400x times better coders than Europeans?". Maybe not, but they can charge 400x more because their market conditions allow them to. Simple.
Which tells me that the claim "They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year." is complete bullshit as a comparison for the German numbers, because it is only for the app itself without any backend or supporting infrastructure. Especially because you made it sound as if the rest of the 6 Million budget was not even used.
In reality, on top of the app development they spend 400k on planning, specification and coordination, 3.2 Million on other software (backend and admin, I suppose), 1.4 Million for deployment(?) and communications, and further maintenance and operations is not in fact accounted for yet.
> hat's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
Ah, nice moving goalposts there.
Yes, it's a very successful project and everyone involved deserves praise. Yes, Finland spent less than Germany for very similar results.
But they didn't spend 400k (let alone 150k) compared to 60 Million. They spent 4 Million compared to 20 Million, which is the overall development costs in Germany, with most of the rest going to the operation of a support call center (and that scales with population size, so legitimately more than 10 times higher in Germany than in Finland).
So why the 5 times higher development costs in Germany? Because they didn't do a public bid like Finland did. They threw money at some big companies they assumed could do it. And for that they got an app 6 weeks earlier than Finland. It turns out that those 6 weeks happened to be a time of low case numbers so that they didn't really matter. But that couldn't be known at the time the whole thing was planned, and if the pandemic had developed differently, those 16 million could have saved thousands of lives.
Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government.
Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex? Based on either citizens' adoption or UX, is it anywhere near as successful?
Built by a small, Agile company, although not by a startup by any classification.