If You’re Appy and You Know It Clap Your Hands [Dead Silence]
There’s an App for That… but Maybe There Shouldn’t Be
I’ve been making iOS apps since 2012, and the #1 piece of advice I give whenever someone asks me about building an app for their business is: don’t.
People think they need an app, but usually what they actually need is a website—sometimes a website that already exists. For instance, “I want to make an app that shows my restaurant’s menu.” -> That should be a website. “I want an app that lets me coordinate scheduling with my employees.” -> Just use Google Calendar and save yourself tens of thousands of dollars.
Apps are expensive and complicated to make and require a lot of work, not just to create but to maintain. Bugs are practically a guarantee, and even if the app works flawlessly on release, sometimes Apple will change some piece of infrastructure that breaks it—or prevents it from working at all. And if you’re making an app for both iOS and Android, the number of things that can go wrong increases an order of magnitude. Add in data transmission/concurrency with a centralized server and that complicates things even more.
The now-infamous Iowa caucus app had all these components and a reportedly two-month timeline to make it all happen—design, engineering, and QA (Quality Assurance, people whose job it is to break the app and who know how to do so). Surprisingly they were only paid $60,000, which is cheap in the world of apps, especially for software this important. I’ve built single-purpose apps with budgets in the hundreds of thousands just for iOS, and those weren’t used to tally votes for the next nominee in a Presidential election.
There are rumors that Shadow (which… wow what a name) used mostly junior engineers on the project, many of whom only recently completed coding bootcamps—which is evident in the decompiled source code someone released online and in the fact that the app transmitted data without any encryption (!!!). It’s clear that the company as a whole was entirely unprepared for building really any app, and was likely hired due to the proximity of their relationship to the Democratic Party more than their competence.
(I would be remiss to omit that Shadow has ties to both Buttigieg and Sanders’s former rival Hillary Clinton, and that Buttigieg himself has paid Shadow for previous work. Plus, the CEO of Shadow’s parent company Acronym, Tara McGowan, has posted anti-Sanders, pro-Buttigieg sentiments on Twitter. These are all pretty major conflicts of interest that should be at the forefront of every news cycle since Tuesday, and yet this scandal is mysteriously unreported.)
Don’t get me wrong—I have nothing against junior engineers, but it’s irresponsible to use anything short of your most experienced people on a project this important, and I think the catastrophic results we witnessed this week will back me up. Even more than that, it’s irresponsible to have built this app in the first place—not just with only two months’ time or junior staff but at all.
Considering it was intended as a way to submit tallied results, if this absolutely had to involve technology for some reason this should have been a website, which would have been far simpler to develop and immediately fixable had anything gone awry.
But honestly, something this important should never have involved the internet at all. Even if the app had been coded properly and worked perfectly and transmitted its data securely, there are plenty of other things that can go wrong and pollute the results. Even if you take every necessary precaution and utilize only Best Practices, user errors can compromise data. For instance, your dad’s online bank login is extremely secure (provided he picks a good password)… until he gets a call from “the bank” telling him they need his login information to “fix a problem with his account”.
Part of the problem is that there’s all this new technology advancing every day, sometimes by leaps and bounds, and most people don’t understand how it works. Those who do understand have an ethical obligation to guide them to make the best decisions, but instead the tendency is to take advantage of their lack of expertise and eagerness to keep up with progress, providing them sleek fancy options they don’t actually need.
There’s this pervasive sentiment that Technology Is The Solution, and nowadays people hear about all these apps and think “I need one of those for my business/organization in order to stay relevant”. Well I’m here as a subject-matter expert with nearly a decade’s experience making apps (and fifteen years in tech) to tell you that you almost certainly don’t. Nobody’s going to go through the trouble of downloading and installing an app just to look at your restaurant’s menu or your company’s products… but plenty of people will visit your website because it’s considerably less effort and accessible from any device. Anyone who tells you otherwise is leading you astray and wasting your money. And if you’re tasked with tallying a Presidential election… maybe stick to secure methods and don’t overcomplicate things.
Ultimately an ethical engineering firm—one without conflicts of interest or ties to certain candidates—would have given the Iowa Democrats the same advice I’ve given over the years: you don’t need an app for that.