U.S. Government Drops $200,000 on Worthless Mobile App

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.

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.