RIP COVIDSafe App, You Were Trash From Day One

RIP COVIDSafe App, You Were Trash From Day One

Last night, fantastic news filled my Twitter feed: the Australian government was finally doing away with the absolutely useless COVID-19 tracking app. It’s news we couldn’t wait to share with you, especially after the Health Minister last month told Gizmodo Australia he considered the COVIDSafe App “a waste” and that it was only a matter of time before it was cancelled.

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, and Australia has a number of precautions still in place, such as mask mandates on public transport and the rollout of a fourth vaccination. We’ve been on alert (to some degree or another) since around March 2020 and many of us were, at the start, glued to press conferences held by former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, telling us how exactly he was planning on thwarting this “unprecedented time” we were in.

Any further context is barely required here: we all lived much of the same experience. An experience not exactly helped by the “game-changing” COVID-tracing app the former government unleashed post-haste.

The app, as you are aware, is called COVIDSafe.

It was officially launched on April 25, 2020, and at launch, suffered registration glitches.

In trying to convince people to download COVIDSafe, Morrison declared the app was like sunscreen.

“Downloading the app is like putting on sunscreen to go out into the sun. It gives us protection as a nation. It protects you, it protects your family, it protects your loved ones, it protects our health workers, and it protects your job, and the jobs of many others, because it enables us to move forward and to get the economy back on the track we want it to be on,” he said.

When reporting on the COVIDSafe app, I called it ‘digital sunscreen’ and it’s a term many remembered from Morrison’s promise of a coronavirus-free life.

Back in October, we reported the federal government had spent a whopping $9.1 million on its COVIDSafe app. At the time, with still no shift since, the COVIDSafe app had found basically no cases of COVID-19 and had done nothing but drain the batteries of those who had installed it. The COVIDSafe app was all but cancelled in the eyes of the public.

report into the troubled app was published in July last year. It said only 17 unique detections had been found through the COVIDSafe app. But the (now former) government wanted you to hear its statistic: that COVIDSafe helped with 37,500 potential encounters.

It’s worth noting, however, those 17 contacts were found in NSW and it was before the wrath of Delta, let alone Omicron that pummelled through the country over Christmas.

After countless issues, complaints and fixes to the COVIDSafe app now under the care of the Department of Health, the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 in April basically said enough was enough:

“The committee recommends that the Australian government cease any further expenditure of public funds on the failed COVIDSafe application,” the committee said in its final report.

With a change in government, last month we thought we’d see where the COVIDSafe app was up to, asking Health specifically if the app had been cancelled, that hosting of the app was no longer being paid for and that all associated data had been deleted.

Here’s what a spokesperson for the Minister for Health told Gizmodo Australia about COVIDSafe:

“The COVIDSafe app has been a waste and wasn’t fit for purpose from the moment it was released.”

“The former Prime Minister touted the app as our sunscreen against COVID but for the amount of money spent we got burnt. It only identified 17 unique contacts at the height of the pandemic.”

“We will take advice from the Department of Health about the ongoing utility of the app.”

And finally, it’s been binned.

The message on the App Store reads: Please uninstall COVIDSafe.

“COVIDSafe is being decommissioned. The app is no longer being used in contact tracing. This update removes functionality of the app so no information is stored or collected. This will enable decommission process of COVIDSafe,” the blurb reads.

This article has been updated since it was first published.


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