There are times it seems the idea that there in an app for everything on the iPhone is completely true. It’s hard to name a large company or website that hasn’t already complemented itself with an app of some sort. Some of these have been completely pointless and some of them have been genuinely useful and really helped the company drive traffic to their website or their services. Most have been an interesting effort in experiment with a form of branding that not every company understands.
However, the app world has lost the UK government as a customer this week after the BBC released the huge costs of developing for the system. At a time where this a huge deficit in the country, the government are trying to do the best they can not to look bloated and wasteful. Amongst other decisions to cut government advertising and marketing, the apps were cancelled.
So what was being made with taxpayer money? Two NHS applications for £10,000 which is a bargain compared to a £32,775 app for the Job Centre and £40,000 app for the DVLA. These are hugely expensive marketing experiments at a time when the government has very little money, but despite this the BBC had to find the information through the Freedom of Information Act after the government wouldn’t disclose the original figures due to “security reasons”.
Mark Wallace from the Payers Alliance told the BBC:
“It seems many Government bodies have given in to the temptation to spend money on fashionable gimmicks at a time when they are meant to be cutting back on self-indulgent wastes of money,” Mark Wallace of the Tax Payers’ Alliance told BBC News.
Someone who is faced with losing their home because of high tax bills, or whose life is being ruined by crime isn’t going to get any reassurance from knowing ‘there’s an app for that”
What do you think? Should iPhone Apps being a part of the government’s budget or were we right to can them?
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