aderutter

Personally I think Beats really suck.
I think Apple buying Beats was a really bad move.
I expect the opposite from new Apple headphones but we’ll see if they are as good as Sennheiser which is the same price bracket.

darkpaw said:

Reasons why I'm not going to use this app:

- The development of the app was given to a specific company. It was not sent out to tender. Now, you can argue that we don't have a lot of time and we needed it developed quickly, BUT...
- The reported budget for the app was £250 MILLION... (Not sure on the veracity of that figure, but it's been widely reported. It may just be part of the deal between UK.gov and Palantir/Faculty.)
- It is being developed by both Palantir (run by the right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel) and Faculty...
- Faculty is an AI startup run by someone called Marc Warner...
- Marc Warner's brother is Ben Warner...
- Ben Warner was recruited to Downing Street by Dominic Cummings (if you don't who DC is, he's basically an unelected advisor to our inimitable dickwad, Boris Johnson)...
- Ben Warner was instrumental in the Vote Leave campaign.

The UK is an f-ing joke.

Same old UK. Nepotism and the old-boys club is still alive and well.

I don't doubt the public sector financial wastage, I've seen it first hand. 

A contractor rate for an iOS developer in the UK can be £600 per day but usually less. A medium-sized agency typically charges twice that at £150 an hour. Premium London agencies easily charge double that. So even if they used a top London agency and had 10 developers working on it for a month it should not cost more than £480,000 to actually develop the app itself.

I doubt they will have 10 developers working for a month, more likely a team of two working long days for a fortnight so that would be 30 man-days or £72,000 for a top agency.

Of course, the real reason that these companies don't want to use the Apple-Google API is so they can charge a fortune for unneeded centralized servers with long-term heavy cost implications and much more profit for the boys. Basically all the cost is either going to agency profit or data storage costs, not app development costs. If they used the Apple-Google solution none of these data storage costs would be incurred. The people advising the NHS what tech to use are the people who are going to make the profit...

For the record, I've worked as a UK contractor in the public sector and in private sector agencies of different sizes as a Senior iOS Developer for some years now. I know what I am talking about.

I wish Apple had just released the single iOS app for all countries to use and Google did the same for Android. There must have been legal or political reasons that didn't happen. That £250 million could have been better spent.