The U.S. Government isn’t exactly known for smart spending, but at least that $10,000 hammer actually works. That’s more than the Department of Labor can say after they blew almost $200,000 on an utterly crappy app for the iPhone and Android.
The app in question is the OSHA Heat Safety Tool, available for free from the App Store. The stated goal of the app is to give access to the heat index where your work, and then converts that temperature into a safety level and offers up some tips on working safely in those conditions.
Okay, not bad so far. That could be useful. But as of writing, the OSHA Heat Index has a lowly average of a one-and-a-half star rating on iTunes. “Amazed at the incompetence,” writes one reviewer. “Did a five year old write this app?” puzzles another.
Sounds pretty terrible, but here’s the kicker: a Freedom of Information Act request reveals that the U.S. Government spent over $96,000 to make this app, along with another $106,467 to make the Android version.
And for all that, the app doesn’t even work. Rich Jones, who discovered the extravagant spending and craptacular app, describes the app thusly:
Pardon my French, but I really cannot stress how bad this application is. Firstly, it isn’t actually capable of the function it is supposed to do. When I first tried the application, it told me that it was currently 140F in Boston. It is also extremely slow, it looks like butt, and it crashes all the time. It is completely horrible in every way. If I had to reproduce it, I’d say that it would take me about 6 hours at the maximum. At my hourly rate of $100, that’s $600.
In other words, the U.S. government has overpaid for this app by roughly $198,800. And after all that, it doesn’t even work correctly. One thing’s for sure: that’s quite the racket the app’s developer Eastern Research Group has put together.
Forget about Occupy Wall Street. Looking at this wasteful spending on useless apps, maybe it’s time to Occupy App Store?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
18 responses to “U.S. Government Wasted $200,000 On Worthless Heat Safety App [Occupy App Store]”
Which Representative’s nephew got that app developing gig?
Since when does the occupy movement care about what the government does. Theyre too busy attacking private citizens for having more money then them
Right… Only gov’t makes mistakes. Not like HP didn’t drive itself to crisis or google didn’t release a laughable iOS mail client or wall st didn’t crash the global economy. Gotta stick to the 1k hammer meme.
Enough of the Reagan ‘govt is the problem crap.
Sorry, but they didn’t only overpay. They first stole money from all of us, then used our money to overpay other people to make this pathetic app. A business in a free market could never fund something this pathetic using stolen money from its customers. For government, this is literally their modus operandi. Unlimited credit = no liability for waste. Millionaires and billionaires come and go, but multi-trillionaire monopolies stick around forever apparently.
Hey, at least they didn’t use it to buy a $200,000 bomb that kills people, lol.
The $10,000 price tags on those hammers were used to conceal their black ops budget.
It’s not that “government” is a problem, the problem is that you and others consider legitimate, the idea of a trillion-dollar funded service provider who uses threat of force to fund itself, enabling near infinite credit, who leaves its customers the only recourse of voting every 730 or 1,461 days for a different “contract”, which is invariably suspiciously similar to the prior. The free market, on the other hand, enables daily “voting”. It’s the 21st century, cultural evolution is severely hampered by a huge portion of our income being extracted by a monopoly with those terms of use and return policy.
To really drive the point home, you already paid for this wasted app you don’t want or use. You had no choice. If you are an Apple customer, you have to pay higher prices to cover the government’s tax that gets passed to customers, like all taxes do. Cut govt spending (and taxes) by 20% and in a competitive market, all prices would drop 20% or more, because that cost would suddenly not be there any more.
The one with the new car.
Quit complaining that it’s useless, doesn’t work, looks like trash. None of those were the point. This is STIMULUS. The official multiplier is about 1.5, so by spending $200,000 for this craptastic app, the government actually created $300,000 (roughly) of economic growth (GDP). This equals saving or creating or supported (the new weasel word for “some of the money that went to someone we sent it to also went to someone else when they spent it, so that job’s on us too”) probably 3000 jobs. (Hey, it’s Obamath. Don’t ask me.) You probably have your job because of this app!