A leading app designer is urging caution in the race to develop a so-called Covid passport as a way of safely unlocking public events and sporting fixtures.
The government is working on a system of certification which could allow people to return to events by being able to prove their Covid status, showing whether they have been vaccinated, recently tested negative, or still have antibodies from being infected.
One idea is that an app proving their status could be built into the current NHS app used to access health services. There were also reports that a scheme to let British travellers go abroad could be ready this summer.
Andy Webber, Technical Director at web and app developers AtomicMedia, says the creators of a new Covid-status certification via a smartphone app should not feel pressured to rush its development.
“I accept that in a crisis it is important to move quickly – and I also know that there is often an element of experimentation involved in developing new software,” said Andy, who heads app development at the Nottingham-based company, which works with several global brands.
“However, even in a crisis, you need to have a plan and be acutely aware of the risks involved. Just because you are under time pressure doesn’t mean common sense and best practice should go out the window.”
Sports bodies, including the Football Association and the England and Wales Cricket Board, recently called for a Covid passport to get fans back into the grounds as soon as possible, in a joint letter to the government.
But the idea has been controversial, with many people uneasy about potential privacy risks and fears that the certificates would be discriminatory and divisive.
“Whatever your viewpoint, it should be relatively straightforward to implement from a technical perspective – but there are a lot of other factors to consider that will make or break the project, such as will people want to use it and will everyone be able to use it?” says Andy.
“Designing something to be used by all demographics including kids and the elderly is no mean feat. What if they don’t have a smartphone? You also need to consider whether venues will enforce it and how easy would it be to circumvent.
“Those are just some of the issues that need to be explored and any one of them could result in the app being deemed a failure.
“We often hear about companies spending millions embarking on complex software projects without doing any upfront analysis and not knowing whether it will be a success or not until launch.
“We encourage our clients to adopt a ‘fail fast’ approach when developing new innovations. The concept is to invest as little as possible as early as possible in order to work out if an idea is feasible or not. If it isn’t, then you’ve not lost very much. If it is, then you haven’t wasted any time and can carry on building or have a slight change of direction. It results in a much more efficient use of budget and resources.”
Andy said he “watched in disbelief” as the government invested in the development of the original Track and Trace system.
“I’ve been developing mobile apps since the iPhone was first launched and most app developers could tell you it was never going to work. The first iteration used a centralised database model and a custom bluetooth solution. This created serious issues regarding privacy as the government would know who you are, where you’ve been, and who you’ve been in contact with. People are very privacy conscious these days, so this solution was unlikely to get high adoption.
“The bluetooth approach was also fundamentally flawed as devices won’t allow apps to continually run bluetooth in the background as it drains the battery. Instead, Apple and Google partnered up to provide a decentralised model and a bluetooth solution that was baked into the operating system.
“The government continued with its approach even though all the industry experts were telling them it wouldn’t work. Eventually, they conceded and adopted the Apple/Google approach which was more successful. Had they adopted a fail-fast approach, they would have arrived at the same point, much more quickly and cheaply.”
His advice is to engage the services of good user experience specialists, carry out user research, build a simple – and cheap – prototype, and repeatedly test it.
He added: “I would urge the government to consider that if at any stage it becomes clear the project isn’t viable, then knock it on the head and have the confidence to look the public in the eye and say ‘we tried something, it didn’t work, but we didn’t spend much money on it.”
