COVID Down Under: where did Australia's pandemic apps go wrong?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Australia's COVID-19 apps, highlighting usability, accessibility, and security flaws that limited their effectiveness, and offers lessons and recommendations for future crisis technology deployment.

Contribution

It provides a systematic review of Australia's pandemic apps, identifies failure modes, and develops recommendations to improve future crisis response applications.

Findings

Apps had significant usability and security flaws.

Failure modes included accessibility issues and security vulnerabilities.

Lessons learned can inform future pandemic app development.

Abstract

Governments and businesses worldwide deployed a variety of technological measures to help prevent and track the spread of COVID-19. In Australia, these applications contained usability, accessibility, and security flaws that hindered their effectiveness and adoption. Australia, like most countries, has transitioned to treating COVID as endemic. However it is yet to absorb lessons from the technological issues with its approach to the pandemic. In this short paper we provide a systematization of the most notable events; identify and review different failure modes of these applications; and develop recommendations for developing apps in the face of future crises. Our work focuses on a single country. However, Australia's issues are particularly instructive as they highlight surprisingly pitfalls that countries should address in the face of a future pandemic.