Bad Apps Are A Government Spending Cut We Can All Agree On

With Obama's Deficit Super Committee poised to fail yet again in their mission to formulate a balanced debt reduction plan, American taxpayers are starting to get hot under the collar. They're steamed not just about the utter incompetence of elected officials (and their unscrupulous financial backers) but about the various "triggers" put in place that are set to enact spending cuts as a result of their failure.

Granted, this may be just a drop in the bucket, but if you want our 2 cents on the matter, here's one thing that no one would mind being slashed from the government's budget: Bad apps.

Blogger Rich Jones writes:

I'm not quite sure how I stumbled onto it, but I found that OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the United States Department of Labor) have an Android application. The purpose of the application is to provide information about the heat index and the corresponding safety warnings. Essentially, it is a temperature converter, it converts a temperature into a safety level. Being an Android developer myself, I wanted to give it a try to see how it handled.

"It's a steamy pile of shit."

Yikes. Whether it's from excessive overhead or just the complex nature of dealing with lots of data from a government institution, the resulting software, says Jones and several others in an inevitable Hacker News thread, is virtually non-functional. And even worse, it cost a whopping $200,000 in taxpayer money to make, as Jones discovered through a request he made under the Freedom of Information Act:

Cost of u s Department of Labor Osha Heat Safety

"This is just one FOIA request to one tiny department for one tiny, single use application that will perhaps be used by, at most, five hundred people.. and it cost as much as a house," Jones writes. But what really adds insult to injury is that due to some absurd loophole having to do with "trade secrets," the source code of the app remains sealed and unavailable for public viewing. That is to say, a public work commissioned by the United States government and paid for with taxpayer money has its blueprints hidden at the request of the contractor who programmed it.

Then again, if I got paid to program something this ugly, I probably wouldn't want to risk being the laughingstock of Github either.

Connections:

• Learning How Your Phone Was Made: There Was An App For That
• An Unnerving Mockumentary About Life In Post-Econopocalypse America
• Casualties of the Last Government Shutdown