Additional reasons not to ship V1.0 yet

Owned by Diarmid Mackenzie (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Apr 24, 2020
3 min read

Thoughts from testing V1.0 so far. I think the following points merit consideration before we launch on the global App Store.

All content now incuded in:V1.0 App Store Release Candidate - Quality Assessment

  1. There are major issues with initial navigation. I would predict the majority of users will fail to get through this without restarting the app. A few may fail altogether:
    https://github.com/tripleblindmarket/covid-safe-paths/issues/675

  2. We have not done enough to make this app work for users who don’t have a Health Authority to Register. If we go live in the gloabl app store this will be the vast majority of our users. The app will look broken because there are no HAs, rather than us taking the opportunity to explain that we are working hard to get HAs up in their area,

  3. If you set up with no HAs, you end up with a screen that says “All clear” rather than “No data”. The only way to get to the No Data screen appears to be to add an HA, and then remove it again. But the default should be “No data” - we should not be reporting “All clear” to someone on the basis of no data. This is especially important when the vast majority of our users will have no data.

  4. The App still has an HA called “Example Test Authority for Testing”. This looks terrible. I understand this data is external to the app, but it should be cleared up before we go live on the App Store.

  5. The News pages still look terrible. Again, I recognize they are hosted outside the App, but we should not go live with the App with the pages as they are. A blank page that says “coming soon” would be better.

  6. The new EULA raises some questions that aren’t easy to answer. When this app goes live, the EULA is sure to get some scrutiny. “Pathcheck Inc” has zero public profile, no website explaining what it is etc. It does not appear on google at all, even if you search for it alongside Safe Paths. I had to look up in a Massachussetts business directory to find any info at all. At least when I did, some names were recognizably part of the Safe Paths project.

  7. Are we happy with the Team section on the About page? It refers to TripleBlind, EyeNetra, Lin Ventures. For TripleBlind, at least there are some traceable connections to the project. The connections and relevance of EyeNetra and Link Ventures are unclear and un-googleable as far as I can tell. This all seems a bit shady. Together with the fact that Pathcheck Inc. is not mentioned here. Given that there is already skepticism about the role of various private entities in the project, this just seems to create more mystery & fuel for suspicion, when we could provide some much clearer information about what the various corporate entities involved are, what their roles are etc.

If we were just going to launch in a single small country I would not be concerned about 4-7, but launching globally, given the considerable profile the project has right now, we can expect a lot of attention from interested journalists, and people concerned about the privacy & ethics of contact tracing.

Given that, it’s much better to have the product looking finished, and link to clear information about the various corporate entities involved in the project.