Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
I&#x27;m surprised this isn&#x27;t mentioned in the article or any comments, and I&#x27;m wondering whether I&#x27;m missing something about the significance of this.<p>But I thought the biggest problem was that Google and Apple didn&#x27;t build a contract tracing app - they built a <i>framework</i> for local governments to build apps on top of. This leaves the work of marketing the app and driving adoption to each government (as well as building and operating the service, which is also significant).<p>When I first heard about this, I thought they were going to build a pair of apps for Android and iOS. It would come as part of an OTA update, and everyone around the world would be presented with a yes&#x2F;no dialog asking whether they wanted to participate. Local governments would then be provided access to a SaaS that would let their contact tracers enter the tokens of known positive cases.<p>I&#x27;m fairly sure that this would&#x27;ve resulted in significantly higher adoption rates.<p>I have no idea what the point was, to require every government build&#x2F;market&#x2F;operate their own version of the exact same app. Maybe so that the backends could be independent? If so, I imagine there would be other ways to work around that, like offering a cloud service and&#x2F;or an open source backend implementation for governments to self-host.