One could build 100 apps with server code and docs with that money, and still have a few million left over for hookers and blow.
Stop defending corruption.
The government was then talking it up with "If enough people download the app, we'll let you go to football games again!!!"
Current media reports say none of our local health departments have found _any_ contacts using it that they hadn't already found via manual contact tracing.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-15/coronavirus-app-limit...
(I think 100 apps+backends for $10mil is a bit optimistic, if those backends are required to be HA and support a significant percentage of a countries population. As a single datapoint, where I work has many iOS+Android+backend app projects for gov departments that serve tens to hundreds of thousands of users that cost them high 5 or low 6 figures plus 4 figures a month support/hosting, but if they wanted me to support the 60% of the population (~15mil users) that our CovidSafe app was targeting it'd most likely come to more like mid to high 6 figures, and certainly 5 figures a month to host/support it. So I'd have said maybe 20 apps realistically for that price. Still just as fraudulent a rorting of taxpayer money though...)
The loss in public reputation if they had failed was not worth even participating.
Also, having worked in a corporate setting would have told you that you can't launch anything for less than 1m EUR/USD, can't launch two things for less than 5m and 3 for less than 20m.
20m really is a laughable sum.
100 random apps or app that have to handle pandemic in country?
Also what about support and infrastructure to handle those milions of concurrent users
Same for what you call concurrent users. Those users have no identity at all and essentially need to anonymously download a bunch of static files which are the same for everyone from a bucket periodically. Put a CDN in front. Done.
The only backend touches that apps do is a few login/register APIs when you first launch it, and if you ever test positive and agree to send your data it sends a big json blob to an AWS Lambda nodejs function that pretty much just uploads the json to S3.
I don't recall how complex the login/register stuff is, but I don't remember thinking "That's gonna need heroics to register 10 or 20 million users quickly" when reviewing the code.
(If you wanna go look yourself, try here: https://github.com/opentrace-community )
The contract tracing apps are really basic... a step above torch apps.
(And the MSS/GRU/NSA/Mossad will all insert their code into your app bundles without you needing to do anything...)
