Australia’s CovidSafe app has been scrapped and branded a “failure” just two years after it was launched at huge expense by the previous Scott Morrison government.
On Wednesday, health minister Mark Butler urged people to delete the application and called it a “colossal waste of more than $21 million of taxpayers’ money”.
The CovidSafe app was launched in 2020 at the peak of the pandemic by former prime minister Scott Morrison, who called it “as essential as putting on sunscreen”.
The app cost the government AUS$21m (£12.2m) to produce, roll out and host, and was designed to help manual contact tracers identify Covid infections around them.
However, the app was successful in identifying just two positive infections that had not been found by manual contact tracing, Mr Butler said, meening it cost more than AUS$10m per infection traced.
It also identified 17 close contacts in New South Wales which were not identified through manual contact-tracing methods.
“It is clear this app failed as a public health measure and that’s why we’ve acted to delete it,” the minister said.
The app was riddled with technical difficulties, including requiring iPhone users to keep their phones unlocked at all times, issues with bugs, and the fact users had to actively give permission for their data to be added and used.
Experts also questioned the effectiveness of the Bluetooth-based tracking method, which does not work most of the time.
The app will be formally decommissioned on 16 August, but it was updated on Tuesday night to remove all its functionality. Users opening the app are now greeted with a message: “Please uninstall CovidSafe”.
According to the Anthony Albanese government, the last upload date of data to the national CovidSafe app was in May 2021 and the data store has not been accessed by state authorities in 2022.
However, the app continued to operate at a running cost of around $75,000 a month of taxpayers’ money. The app has cost around $10m in development, $7m in advertising and marketing, and more than $2m in staffing.
The Australian government moved to QR codes and check-in apps for contact tracing in 2021 after restrictions were relaxed. Experts anticipated at the time that the technology would be integrated into the app. But that did not happen.
An analysis published by the Lancet Public Health journal concluded that CovidSafe created extra work for contact tracers and did not make any meaningful contribution to Australia’s Covid response.
