The COVIDSafe app, introduced by the Morrison government in 2020, has been decommissioned after a senate select committee branded it an expensive failure and the health minister said state governments haven’t used it for months.
The app was updated on Wednesday night to remove all of its functionality, and users opening the app are now greeted with the message “Please uninstall COVIDSafe”. On Thursday, Health Minister Mark Butler said the app did little but burn through money.
Health Minister Mark Butler said contact tracers working on the ground were far more effective than the COVIDSafe app.Credit:alex ellinghausen
“It is clear this app failed as a public health measure, and that’s why we’ve acted to delete it,” he said. “This failed app was a colossal waste of more than $21 million of taxpayers’ money.”
Butler said while the app had 7.9 million registrations, fewer than 800 users consented to having their data added to the national store. Since its launch in April 2020, the app had only identified two positive cases that were not found by manual contact tracing, he said.
Designed to aid contact tracers by determining the people that an infected individual had been physically near, COVIDSafe was originally described by Morrison as like a sunscreen you need to apply when you go outside. But it was an immediate source of controversy.
Technical limitations meant that people using iPhones needed to keep the app on their screens, and their phones unlocked at all times, prompting concerns for their security as well as their phone batteries. After several updates, experts continued to question the efficacy of the Bluetooth-based tracking method — which was shown to work less than half of the time — as well as the government’s decision to decline help from Apple and Google.
Former PM Scott Morrison described COVIDSafe as a way to protect the community against infection.Credit:alex ellinghausen
After two months and 6 million downloads the app had failed to detect any close contacts that hadn’t already been identified by traditional contact tracers. A government report published in July of last year disclosed that the app only led to 17 unique close contacts as at May 2021. An evaluation published in the Lancet Public Health journal concluded this caused substantial additional work for contact tracers, without making a meaningful to COVID response.
As state governments opened up in 2021 and moved to QR codes and check-in apps for contact-tracing, the expectation was that they’d somehow integrate with COVIDSafe, but this ended up not happening.