https://tech.newstatesman.com/coronavirus/where-did-it-all-go-wrong-for-the-uks-covid-19-contact-tracing-app

Back in May, the UK’s oh-so-imminent contact tracing app was hailed as the jewel in the crown of its “world-beating” tracing programme. In the three months since, it’s charted an undignified fall from grace. Now, the project head-down in a ditch, legs akimbo, the government has finally admitted defeat and meekly acknowledged a shift to Google and Apple’s model.

A potent concoction of technosolutionism and hubris over the UK’s ability to solve impossible technical problems led the country down this tortuous path. The fatal flaw was the decision to go for a centralised, as opposed to decentralised, app. Google and Apple had said that only decentralised apps would be able to run continuously (i.e. work effectively) in the background on their handsets (i.e. 99 per cent of all phones).