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

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 a) provide a systematization of the most notable events; b) identify and review different failure modes of these applications; and c) 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.