The corona app doesn't need to be a huge contract. But SAP and T-Systems can sure waste a huge amount of time and charge a huge amount of money for it.

Everything the federal government does is a huge contract. Of course, in a hypothetical paradise it wouldn't have to be. But in the real world, it is. That's still no reason to be surprised.

From what I know, SAP and Deutsche Telekom were chosen because:

- SAP built an app on very short notice where Germans traveling abroad could register for one of the government-organized flights back to Germany. The government was satisfied with how this played out, therefore they were the first choice for building the app part.

- Telekom is already operating several backend services for the RKI (the German counterpart of the CDC) and the local health offices, so they were the first choice for building the backend part that needs to integrate with these systems.

Disclosure: I work at SAP, but not on the Corona app. I'm not referring to any internal knowledge. What I know, I know from public media.

Quick off topic question: How is the work culture at SAP?

Is the public sentiment that it's software is impossibly hard to manage and develop for based in reality?

(Disclosure the one time I had to access SAP Data via an API it felt like running against a wall of legacy tables and badly documented interactions -> My sentiment may be biased)

It's a good place to work. As with any large enterprise, there's quite some politics going on between org units and teams, but my direct managers are committed to shielding the team from most of it so that we can stay productive.

As for whether SAP software is "impossibly hard to manage and develop for", I cannot comment on it much since I'm working in cloud infrastructure, so I'm mostly dealing with Docker, Kubernetes, Openstack, etc.

I've seen a bit of SAP software, and IMO a good way to think about it is that an SAP system is kind of like a separate operating system. It's a completely different world. And just like I (a Unix guy) would be completely lost if you asked me to manage a Windows Server system or develop for it, same with the SAP system.

Most people only ever learn to use it in the same way most people who come in contract are only users with no deep admin/dev knowledge. So the question is if you can find someone who has deep-enough knowledge of the system to implement or configure what you need.

That's hard especially for the kernel. If you're running Linux, it's not that hard to hire someone with kernel development experience. For the SAP kernel, it's next to impossible. All these guys work for SAP.

Developing a tool to be used by 80 million people to help fight a global pandemic under big time pressure is not a huge contract?

It isn't if you do it well. Think of WhatsApp that had about 55 people when it was bought for several billions. Especially if you need it done quickly, many mediocre developers are no substitute for a few good developers.

Maybe SAP and Telekon can be arsed to gather their best if it's actually important. For Toll Collect, the usual suspects failed very hard. Much effort, buggy and very late results.

The Italian app is on GitHub. You can check the size of the project.

The iOS app has 3 main contributors https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-app-ios/graphs/contribu...

The Android app has one with 50+% of commit https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-app-android/graphs/cont...

Then there are several backend. All considered it's not a small project but not a large one.

The Swiss app is developed by a small independent development studio, and for what it's worth they seem to be doing a better and faster job than SAP & Telekom:

https://www.ubique.ch/index.html

I know for a fact that there was no formal tender process, it was just a matter of having the right contacts and being at the right place. Sadly connections still matter much more than experience in Germany.