MacDailyNews has an interesting article this morning concerning an apparently worthless app financed by the U.S. government (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) for the tidy sum of $200,000.
Rich Jones, in his blog at Gun.io, says:
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 sh*t.
[…]
Pardon my French, but I really cannot stress how bad this application is. Firstly, it isn’t actually capable of the function it is supposed to do […] It is also extremely slow, it looks like butt, and it crashes all the time. It is completely horrible in every way. […] The quality of the product didn’t surprise me a huge amount – I don’t ever expect very much from the federal government. Still, I was curious about how much we taxpayers payed for the program – and it knocked me off my feet.”
Jones filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out the cost of the application, names of the developers, and the source code, and received the following response:
The application cost $106,467 for the Android version, and an additional $96,000 for the iPhone and (non-existent) BlackBerry version. That’s more than $200,000 for less than $2,000 worth of non-functional temperature converters.
You can read the original (uncensored) article from Mr. Jones at Gun.io. Be warned, however – Mr. Jones enjoys using profanity in his writings.
