<story><title>Why Britain banned mobile apps for government agencies</title><url>https://govinsider.asia/smart-gov/why-britain-banned-mobile-apps/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>GDS have done a fantastic job of what you might call &amp;quot;government UX&amp;quot;, by getting people with the right technical ethos in charge. HN would approve of their minimalist, functional, responsive approach.&lt;p&gt;Letting govt agencies who don&amp;#x27;t know what they&amp;#x27;re doing go out and tender for private sector building of internet services would be a disaster; they&amp;#x27;d be oversold six ways from Sunday. Treble the cost to build the same thing three times for the three mobile platforms? Sure. Given that 99% of the stuff is simple secure form-filling, it doesn&amp;#x27;t need to be more than a web page.&lt;p&gt;I can file my taxes or renew my driving license online. The system works.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Britain banned mobile apps for government agencies</title><url>https://govinsider.asia/smart-gov/why-britain-banned-mobile-apps/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kristianc</author><text>As a Briton, the idea of having to access government services through mobile apps seems vaguely offensive.&lt;p&gt;Apps are expensive to build, allow rampant surveillance that it&amp;#x27;s very hard to audit under the hood, and mean that customer information is distributed based on your ability to access a smartphone.&lt;p&gt;The U.K. government also has a poor record of delivering large scale IT projects with complex chains of dependencies (the overhaul of the NHS IT system was cancelled after spending several billions on a Patient Information system that no one ever ended up using). Given the chance, departments would have tried to create the &amp;#x27;Everything App&amp;#x27; at enormous expense and with zero interoperability between depts.&lt;p&gt;The decision to push the GDS methodology across the whole of government was hugely unpopular within the civil service at the time but they&amp;#x27;ve been absolutely vindicated in their approach.</text></comment>