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No iPhone Apps, Please — We're British
GMGruman writes "The BBC has stirred up quite a row in Britain about a shocking use of taxpayer funds: creating iPhone apps to provide citizens services. As InfoWorld blogger Galen Gruman notes, it's apparently bad in Britain for the government to use modern technology during a recession, a mentality he likens as a shift from 'cool Britannia' to 'fool Britannia.'"
iPhone apps are great and all, but they're not much use to people who don't have iPhones. Why not work on regular old websites? Also you run the risk of Apple pulling your app from the store. Then there's thousands of taxpayer pounds down the drain.
Ok, but maybe the taxpayer dollars should be spent on services that everyone can make use of, not just iPhone users.
it's bad to waste money doing iphone apps when you could save money and do a website which people other then iphone users can use. Why no do android apps too? What about blackberry, symbian etc? max? linux? pc? Yes, it's a waste of money because most people haven't got an iphone, android phome, mac etc etc. Some people have a pc, and they probably have an internet connection, so a website will do. It's the BBC - they make/show tv shows.
with massive cuts on the way, each ministry is frantically pointing out where cuts can be made in other ministries... and it doesn't help that beancounters can only see direct savings by cutting things... savings through efficiency are harder to measure... even worse, they find it hard to contemplate spending money somewhere to actually save because people are able to take advantage of the apps and not have to waste time making a face-to-face appointment which requires having people employed to handle
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Isn't it more that some people have suggested that making applications for unemployed people, that only run on phones costing 40 pounds (70$) a month is a bit poorly targeted. And that perhaps making websites for renewing car tax etc is more efficient than making apps that only run on a tiny minority of people's phones (any phone that can run an app can use the website.)
Why on earth does the government need to spend loads of money making things slightly more convenient for a tiny minority of nerds and rich tech hipsters, when these people are perfectly able to use the existing websites.
Sent from my phone, obviously!
I would argue that this is wasteful on the basis that the vast majority of iPhone apps are made redundant by a web browser, for which forms and other online software can be written more quickly and efficiently, and also be available to a far greater user base.
Apps that provide services to a small minority of British citizens. Or... is Starbucks very common in the UK?
"...and was shocked that people would believe it to be unseemly and even objectionable that a government was using modern technology to help its citizens in noble tasks like avoiding becoming roadkill when their motorocycles break down or keep track of potential jobs without being stuck at home all day -- the very things you'd want government to do with your tax dollars" I can't imagine why anyone would object to spending £10000 on an app to make a flashing light. And I have to wonder how many unemployed people who own an expensive iPhone will be using government jobs websites... Lets face facts here. The iPhone is a heavily locked down platform run by control freaks in California and owned by a very small percentage of the population. Tell me again why should my tax go towards supporting that platform?
Here is the BBC story if anyone is interested: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10514367.stm
Governments using modern technology to support/educate users should be encouraged - it will assist the UK IT industry employment, grow UK IT capabilities and give citizens the information they need when they need it. But at the same time, a government should be careful not strongly benefit one closed source platform over other platforms. Of course this doesn't mean that the UK government should build applications in all mobile platforms - just that they should build at lease some software application on another platform - preferably an open source one.
You break all the laws of physics and you seriously think there wouldn't be a price?
Cutting spending in a depression is rarely a good strategy. The rich will of course continue to do just about as well - because they just go into crisis mode and order more folks fired to cut spending. That means all the non-rich are left competing for fewer positions with many, many times the number of other potential job seekers.
Cutting overall government spending doubles this effect by denying more public jobs, while at the same time cutting services that would have helped them make ends meet while there is no practical access to jobs.
Ideally, what you'd do is tax actual non-business wealth where possible to fight hoarding, so the super-wealthy will be pressured to push money into the market and infrastructure more actively, and less into 'bonuses'. You use that money to help keep the lower and middle classes afloat - where that money will go immediately back into the marketplace, redoubling its effect. You also use that money to fund the development of more small businesses, while cracking down more monopolies, freeing up legal and anti-competitive hurdles that these companies face currently in the current marketplace.
The conservative "austerity" arguments are cruel - meant to deny the downtrodden any meager assistance in order to solve a problem they seem unwilling to solve when they have power. Conservatives tend to run up debt while in power, to promote the idea that they can make the nation strong, then complain about debt AND weakness while out of power, as the nation attempts to rebuild after their spending orgy (usually funneled to private interests).
Ryan Fenton
The issue here isn't that there's iPhone apps being developed during a recession, it's that money is being invested in a duplication of services when the government is looking to slash spending by up to 40% across the board. When we're looking at a devastation of public services, it's hard to condone spending intended to benefit a minority of Britons with access to a luxury device.
The UK government has done some great things which can allow third party apps, such as create the TransXChange schema for exchanging information about public transport (which is used other places too).
On my iPhone I have TripView which is a third party app that (I assume) uses such data and provides a far better interface than any web page (or paper based time table) could.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
With the capabilities of HTML5 you'd think they'd do webapps instead of platform-specific ones.
They sort of buried the lead. It's not "the latest technology," it's an iPhone. Programming a government anything for an Apple product is extremely unfair and insulting to people smart enough to use something better from another company.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The "other places too" text was supposed to be a link to it's use in New South Wales, Australia
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Heaven forbid a government finding new and innovative ways to deliver services to its people. Maybe the iPhone is not the best platform, but at least they are trying.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
i think its less to do with using technology, or apps only being for iphone, or the total amount spent- its the amount spent on single apps. i can't believe £10'000 or £40'000 is good value for money for a single app.
i'm not sure how much you pay an iphone developer but if you pay them £40 per hour then thats 1'000 hours and thats 125 full time days (4 months) to make an app that demonstrates how to change a wheel. i've never made an iphone app, but i can't believe it takes 125 days fulltime to make a basic one.
there will be lots more stories of excess and waste from the previous government coming out and not all of it will be tech related. this story isn't an attack on technology, its an attack on the previous government's waste.
tl/dr
One of the apps was for the Job Centre which tend to concentrate on lower paid jobs to help people on the dole find employment. So the target audience for the app are those least likely to be able to afford an iPhone to use it! If, instead of being distracted by a shiny new toy, even a minimal level of thought had been put into the planning stage this would have been obvious.
What the article completely seems to miss is that the scandal is about stupid, ineffective use of technology not the use of technology itself. Innovation is certainly to be encouraged but if your new innovation is a square wheel you should expect to get shouted at for wasting money.
The summary is fucking awful. This isn't about the BBC *at all*, they're the ones reporting the story about the *Government* wasting money on largely worthless iPhone apps rather than focusing on useful, cross platform ones.
These ridiculous public sector projects are developed by people who want the stability of public sector employment and the cachet of working in a hi-tech environment. If you want to draw a public sector salary and build a public sector pension then please get the basics right and provide a useful service to *all* citizens. If you want to work with the latest, greatest hi-tech whiz-bang then join a start-up. Please stop CV building at tax-payers' expense.
"And they can easily charge and make the cost of development back."
Wait. We pay them (taxpayer money) to make the application, then pay them to get it?
you mean like this
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html
A debate on whether iPhone apps are useful or not is a different matter, but I find this statement ridiculous:
"bad in Britain for the government to use modern technology during a recession"
The British government can request all its citizens to start living in caves and learn how to hunt animals. That's the easiest solution to 'recession', isn't it? In general, I have a high opinion of any regime that tries to keep abreast of the times and embraces the latest technology. That's rare enough in any Government in the first place. Criticize the use and limited reach of iPhones if you wish, but stop claiming that 'use of modern technology is bad during recession'
Whilst I see the points being made, even £40000 is cheaper than the websites they make. Some had £4 to £5 million for planning alone. If you want a tipoff, get SERCO to make a site for you ( who then subcontract to BT)
As someone who has recently spent time on the "dole" in the UK I was surprised to see how many people had smartphones - a substantial amount of which were iPhones.
I figure it you need income support and iPhone is out of reach but I guess if Tesco sells them "every little helps".
I don't think developing iPhone apps is a thing any government should do.
Providing API's to services and letting commercial/public developers slog it out in the marketplace seems a much wiser way to go.
Thank you. I didn't RTFA. As you say, nothing to do with the BBC, who are not developing iPhone apps.
Apologies to all for the wasted bytes.
For the uneducated masses to understand how government works, they first got to get it through their thick skulls that there is no such thing as the government.
It is not Number 10, or the White House and it is not the IRS. Instead you have a huge pile of loosely connected organisations and individuals who might in some part be funded with tax-payers money and get their instructions probably in some way from elected officials... but think about it. Just how often does the IRS need to talk to the president (using American examples since Americans would be confused by other governments, but the rest of the world is smart enough to translate it to their own system)?
What you end up with is a something that makes a mega-corp like Microsoft or even one of the asian giants look like a garage setup. And just as MS does some odd things you wouldn't expect like developing a new method for inserting batteries, so does the government.
Now take this story and substitute iPhone app with website. A LOT of you suggest it would have been better to develop a webapp that EVERYONE could access.
WHOOOP WHOOP WHOOP, BIASED SLASHDOT NERD WARNING
Everyone can access the web? No they can't. Not everyone and therefor by the logic that since not everyone has an iPhone no iPhone apps should be developed, the government should also develop no websites. Or for that matter have a phone line.
PART of the government job is to think of the future. iPhone apps are "the future" in the same way as Websites were 15 years ago. Part of this money isn't just for providing a useful service to a handful of people, but about finding out about new technolgies that might chance how the government communicates with its citizens.
When the first government website launched, it wasn't just to do its own job, but to test how this might work out in the future. And some of this will result in nothing and some... well how much do you use the internet today? Remember, the internet, brought to you by the US government. NOT by private industry. Could you imagine the internet if MS had developed it?
What people who call for government to do only the absolute minimum and never spend any money seem to desire is a world that declines until nothing is being done anymore. They would no doubt have protested fitting the police station with a phone, since only the rich had phones anyway. And why should the bobby have a car when only 1% of the population has cars? Why build hardened roads for those rich bastards with cars?
The British should know what happens when government spends the least possible. Have they forgotten the year the railroads sucked even more then usual when everything had to be fixed in a hurry after decades of neglect?
Yes, some money will be wasted. But it is part of the process of society constantly changing. Yes, you could say that investment in a BBS site was a waste of money. You would be wrong but you could say it. Let people who are willing to explore things run the country. Else you end up with a country run by accountants. Laywers are bad enough, but accountants? Here is a simple sum: You are not cost effective, please step into the suicide boot.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If the government had gone about this the right way, it would have provided a phone independent API to its services, so that iPhone, Android, Symbian (any any other) developers could produce applications to access those services. That way it could have got its tools without paying for them. It makes you wonder whether any of Infoworlds investers have their fingers in the gravy train....
The Register points out that in other news, the Government has spend £35million ($50million) on developing a single website see:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/30/coi_website/
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
No iPhone Apps, Please — I dont have an iPhone. author of this article obviously has an iPhone.
it is an independent corporation funded by the licence fee.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
WTF should Britain be spending money on iphone apps? Using their apparent rejection of iphone as the one true future as proof of Britain's technology illiteracy is ridiculous. This smacks of Steve Jobs worship and/or extreme stupidity. (Is the author aware of the current political sphere around funding in Britain atm?)
What you have to understand is that the majority of the UK newspapers, in readership terms, are controlled by Rupert Murdoch, who sees the BBC as a dangerous rival to his ambitions to control British television. So basically any time the BBC does anything that costs money, his papers jump on it for wasting taxpayer funds. (Mind you, they do walk into some of these things - take the millions they spent on propaganda for digital pay TV).
That seems like a sensible reaction on the face of it but really its silly and wrong. If people using it pay for it then you won't have paid for it. If it breaks even then only those using it paid. If you argument was that the taxpayer paid for it so it could be available to all and THAT is being taken away then you might have a point. But paying for something with taxes and then charging for it is 100% normal. For example look at any toll bridge or highway.
As a taxpayer you pay for the availability and the people that use the service pay to use it.
PART of the government job is to think of the future. iPhone apps are "the future" in the same way as Websites were 15 years ago. Part of this money isn't just for providing a useful service to a handful of people, but about finding out about new technolgies that might chance how the government communicates with its citizens.
You are very wrong.
Websites were and are an open standard.
iPhone apps are almost exactly the opposite of that.
The government officials involved should be apologising and paying back funds involved in something this stupid.
>If a TV viewer in Britain doesn't pay their license fee then they can be fined heavily and, ultimately, sent to prison.
Only if they're stupid enough to let the TV licencing goons into their house voluntarily (they don't have any legal right of access), then incriminate themselves by signing a confession. If you ignore the junk mail TVL send out, and close the door on the goons, there's no problem - been doing so for years.
Here in the States, National Public Radio has an iPhone app, and my local station, the uber-cool KCRW, also has one.
Granted, neither of those apps provide motorcycle information, but NPR is, in part, publically funded.
In other news, those condemning the use of trains to cart Jews to the gas chambers in the 1940's indicates they're luddites, do they not know travelling by train is the future?
Logic. Sort of.
Guys - a lot of you have missed the big picture.
The government had a go at the BBC for spending money to develop iPhone(mainly)/Android apps. Because the beeb is a public institution (supported by the government and taxpayers) the government decided it was a waste of money.
The BBC then decided to ask for government expenditures on technology. It did this through the Freedom of Information act.
The beeb has discovered that the government is spending a lot of money on websites and iphone apps. And by a lot of money - I mean that one website cost £35 million! And the apps are on trivial/useless things (mostly).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/30/coi_website/
AC
- iPhones are proprietary. Unless the Gov supports other platforms (Android, RIM, WinMob, Symbian), it is unfair to support just one.
- Could not the same results be achieved with a web-only (intrinsically multi-platform) app ?
- is the stuff that important that it MUST be available on a mobile (I should RTFA, maybe...)
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
As a Brit, I thank you. We are now the World again! Rule Brittannia! Britannia rules the waves!
is kdawson now samzenpus? whats going on here?!
You don't have to pay if you don't receive TV broadcasts. I have a TV but it isn't tuned in and used for playing DVDs. I do not have to pay the license.
Let me guess: you're a Daily Mail reader or a libertarian USian.
Or they don't watch TV as it's being broadcast.
No matter the medium, smartphone, iPlayer, TV reception, etc. - so long as you don't watch/record it while it's being broadcast live on TV, you're fine. You can watch anything "historical" (i.e. was on TV 20 minutes ago) without needing a license at all (though how you record that using a DVD/VCR/PVR without recording the live signal is another matter entirely, but thankfully the BBC have iPlayer to solve that problem).
Realising that I watch about 0.01% of what's broadcast, if that, and that I watch things that are mostly being *re-broadcast* (and thus easily available on DVD / VHS), and that I watch most things online in a time-shifted way anyway, I stopped paying for a TV licence. You do have to deal with the idiot licensing authorities who appear to have a hard time believing someone *does* understand the law and *doesn't* need a TV license, no matter how legitimately, but that's another matter entirely.
And as pointed out - they have no right to enter premises AT ALL unless accompanied by a police officer who himself has to have good cause and/or a search warrant. Considering the TV licence is about the same price as a cheap TV itself (discounts for blind / black-and-white "viewers" - big F deal) it's hardly worth them even bothering to go that far when they can just spam every valid address in the UK with their "You don't appear to have a license" crap which you can happily bin and ignore.
Here in CH the Swiss federal railways decided to develop an iPhone app where you can consult the timetables. You can even buy an electronic ticket. Pretty cool.
Needles to say, there's no Android version and the NOKIA version of the app is on of the finer varieties of crap. The iPhone app shifts good money towards Apple.
If anything, public money should be spent on open(-ish) systems and IMHO Android should be the first supported platform.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The BBC is probably the one thing that Britain is best at in the world. No other English-language country has anything as good as it (can't comment on others); it is quite wonderful. I think you underestimate how much it would cost to subscribe to ABC1-friendly 6Music, Radio 4, BBC2/4 if it were not cross-subsidised by the 90% of the population who never watch them- but can if they like. Cultural ghettoisation is bad for all of us. And, of course, who makes a huge % of the high-quality programmes you see on non-BBC tv?
I totally agree with you re: news reporting. However, allowing Sky/Fox to be the arbiter of news agendas sends a violent shiver down the spine.
It's that it's using technology at a large expense that helps only a small percentage of people.
If 20% of people use iPhones, the government would still have to come up with a way to give fair treatment to the other 80% who don't. It's the responsibility of government to make its services equally available to all, and by doing what they are doing, they are making services disproportionately more available to a small percentage of the population, and that's wrong.
Seriously horrible troll of an article.
The summary is written by the same guy wrote the "blog" at InfoWorld, to which he links. InforWorld's astroturfing here has devolved from the shameless into the downright misleading and incomprehensible. But they've probably already paid Slashdot in advance for the space so they've got to fill it somehow...
Responses to some of you misinformed points: The BBC reported the story - they are not the subject of it. The licence fee is not mandatory; simply throw away your televisions and radios and, hey presto, you don't have to pay a penny. Just because you (and I) don't like the majority of crap programmes they put out doesn't mean everyone else hates them too, you just need to appreciate the decent stuff that they do make and broadcast. Yes the BBC news is biased, but it's a lot less biased than most by sheer virtue of their fear of legal action. My God why am I wasting time with an AC...
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can probably read the BBC article using the BBC news app on my android phone. For those of you unfamiliar with the BBC, it's a corporation operating under royal charter that's funded primarily by taxes (the television licensing fee). Oh irony, how you brighten my day...
If the anti-smoking app only gets 10 people to quit smoking and the drinks tracker only prevents 10 serious DUI accidents, the entire app foray would still pay for itself tenfold.
"No other English-language country has anything as good as it (can't comment on others); it is quite wonderful." You, in fact, did comment on the others with that very statement. I still don't think the pool of taxpayer money, of which nearly everyone contributes, should be used to create something that benefits only the few. Apple would like you to believe that every relevant person on the planet already has an iPhone, but the reality is, most can't afford it and quite a few others simply don't want one.
I entirely agree with this of course, but there's another point: it's not just about marketshare.
When the Government (or the BBC, or even private companies) only support Windows-only solutions, people rightly criticise them. On Slashdot, there's no end of criticism. The fact that 90% of people use Windows is beside the point - those 10% should still have a right to use it. So even if we lived in a fantasy world where the Iphone was the market leader (as some people here bizarrely seem to believe), it would still be worthy of criticism.
There's also a point about unfair competition. Why is the Government giving an unfair advantage to one company, by using taxes to write apps for their platforms? Not to mention the problems of allowing Apple total control over whether the Government apps are approved or not!
Of course, the fact that the Iphone is only owned by about 3% of the population just makes this all the more ridiculous.
I agree entirely with your post, though just to add:
although no one model outsells the iPhone
Don't get fooled by the "only one model" myth we get from Apple users :) There have been several generations, with very different features. Even within a single generation, there are different models (albeit very similar, but then the same is true of many Nokia phones say, that have different model numbers despite only minor changes in features and running the same CPU/OS/etc).
I'm not sure why it matters if it was only one phone anyway - just because one company decides to produce several models doesn't mean they're guaranteed more sales, rather, their sales may be split between the models. It might be special if it meant a phone sold well for a long period of time, but that's not true here anyway, since Apple update their phones as often as anyone else.
For a real example of a single model, look at the RAZR 3. To put things into persective, that phone sold twice as many phones as Apple have ever sold in their entire product range! And that's just one of Motorola's many phones!
For another comparison: Nokia sell more phones every quarter than Apple have ever sold...
If you bothered to RTFA before sounding off, you'd see that it's the government making the debatable apps. The BBC is just reporting on the issue.
Now if only I could find an IT-savvy MP I could forward this to...
they are using limited funds to make a system that only a small pool of taxpayers can use.
Why don't that use that money to make a good online presence that ANY smart phone can use?
That would be a good use of money instead of paying money for admission to a fenced garden that only a small pool of user could use.
If the apps where on Open product, then they could be used with smart phones the support open apps. This would have the potential to be available to all.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I was just about to suggest using J2ME , the true multi handset "app" platform which would do wonders for a entity like BBC as they could get whatever powerful certificate they want...
Of course, it is not "cool" or "hip" but it works, ask Opera guys (Mini), especially in such scenario. Yahoo idiots did their own J2ME platform based runtime once, suggesting developers to work with widgets and either the lack of trust (which was verified later) or financial issues resulted in giving up. I actually used it on my handset as many people, it worked perfectly. As it is a schizoid company, they abandoned it and suggested everyone use their branded Opera Mini which is essentially J2ME.
Of course, there is a catch. You support 99% of phones (non smart included) but, you still have to code an "app" for iPhone as it doesn't support J2ME.
While on it, iPhone is an advanced smart phone, it doesn't equal "modern technology". Android, Symbian and even Windows 7/Mobile are modern too, in their own way.
As we talk about multi platform access, I don't mention the funny fact that Symbian is at London, open source, huge market share and British technology. That is a question Symbian foundation, especially Nokia should ask themselves first and BBC later...
NHS Choose & Book and medical records database £13bn
- don't work properly, slow, horribly intrusive (central control of your medical records), new govt can't figure out whether to scrap it or try and get something useful out of the £13bn spent.
ID cards £20bn, £1+bn spent
- centrepiece of Labour's Stasi 2.0, including numbering the population and issuing them with tagging to collect data on the minutiae of their lives.
Contactpoint (ID cards for kids) £224m
- making sure the kiddies are on the database by insisting that all schoolkids & parents are registered
Defence Information Infrastructure £7bn
- still not finished
And which country's IT corporations got all the contracts? Yes, the good old US of A.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7079044.ece
Not everyone has a browser, so a browser-only app is stupid. At least make it a normal piece of paper, which anyone with eyes can access.
"Sure, let's have the Government expand it to provide for Symbian, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, J2ME etc."
There is no need to "expand". Code something in J2ME and ship on _everything_ you mention, including non smart ones. Believe or not, you can even do "location based" cool stuff on J2ME handsets.
Blackberry and Android, no matter how good they hide that fact, are Java based. You know, it is not "cool" to run Java these days. I mean "Java based" as, J2ME extended, a special Java, whatever you want to call it.
I wonder if Oracle completely opened, freely licensed J2ME, it would change a thing? Don't answer too quickly as I have seen Nokia spend hundreds of millions of dollars to open source symbian, acquire Qt, LGPL it, the result: "iPhone=modern technology", Nokia=Amateur coder, troll target.
available then let other people build the apps.
I don't say "ship a BBC sisx and abandon everything" of course... I just want to remind the people that, Symbian, now open source down to a point asking users "what to change in next UI" to ordinary users is in fact, British.
If I was a British, I would be pissed at "iPhone modern app" misinformation. In fact, if you look very deeper, it is BBC which has a huge effect on Acorn/Psion/Symbian. That is the 80s BBC who could be visionary enough to change where technology is heading, general public access technology (check BBC Micro), can invent unheard things (Teletext aka CeeFax) etc.
What happened and they changed to a "lets wait for that intern at Apple to verify our app symbols"? Anyone (except Murdoch trolls) wrote about it?
For people saying "It is a small amount of money", let me remind you, they have a station which a guy from Istanbul tunes in each morning to hear unique/quality British music (BBC 6) and they almost closed it down for budget reasons.
They ran a 2 minute segment of video highlights and interview with Assange which is still available via the website. I saw it covered on peak programming such as the 10 o'clock news and Breakfast. On the website they also provided the full video and promoted discussion on it. There are some follow-up articles on there too.
The title "No iPhone Apps, Please — We're British" along brings a smile to my face.
Srly. Why not just make mobile compatible websites already rather than apps that only one platform or another can use.
Common sense rly.
The BBC is probably just pissed off that they weren't allowed to create a BBC iPhone app, so are getting their revenge on the government by exposing all the pointless apps they've came up with.
Is the &mdash supposed to be cute or clever?
Hire a developer who can fix that for you. It's 2010, not 1997.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
A lot has already been ranted about this so Ill be brief:
App for the masses -> Cross-platform or web-based.
App development -> Hire a bunch of unemployed programmers through the national employment agency, after which the app/web can be submitted to review/checking/securing by a government office.
App cost -> Make sure that the app is add supported so that the income can go towards paying the cost of the app; as soon it's paid for itself, extra income is pumped towards unemployment tackling (don't know about the legal stance on this last one but hey, it seems logical to me).
As for the author's article? Pff.