Australia has had an app for a few months now that has not provided any useful information since its creation.

The Australian app (COVIDsafe) does not use the Apple/Google API becuase the Goverment wanted location tracking which is banned under their terms.

This means the COVIDsafe app chews up battery life and is vulnerable to power saving features which shut down its communication after a short amount of time on iOS in particular.

It would have been far better to use the API and obtain the location data from elsewhere (Google, Ad networks, Mobile Carriers) if really needed. If this were a less free country I'd suspect the location tracking was part of a government spying program but instead I just chalk it up to incompetence.

They didn't even build the app. They just skinned an open source one which was made before the APIs came out. I doubt the government has the talent available to update it to use the new apis.