Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilors yesterday called the mobile applications policy of former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) administration unproductive and a waste of taxpayer money.
The Hau administration spent more than NT$36 million (US$1.14 million) developing 56 mobile apps since 2010, of which 24 have already been withdrawn, DPP councilors Chen Tzu-hui (陳慈慧), Lee Ching-feng (李慶鋒), Yan Juo-fang (顏若芳) and Hsu Chia-pei (許家蓓) told a news conference yesterday.
The councilors said that the least practical software was developed for the 2013 National Games in Taipei and cost more than NT$1.4 million to develop, but was available for just 88 days, and had been downloaded just 3,851 times.
The application with the shortest lifespan lasted 65 days and spurred just 135 downloads; the city government created it for a literary event, they said.
Of the 24 applications removed from the market, nine were designed for one-off events, with a combined cost of more than NT$3.8 million, they said.
The least downloaded application — “CooC-School” — was designed for educational services, they said, adding that it drew just 83 downloads.
In addition, information in an app highlighting the capital’s culinary experiences overlapped, with material from one category copied and pasted into another, they said.
The councilors called for an overhaul of the city government’s app policy and said Hau’s administration had failed to evaluate and promote the apps, resulting in low use and poor user experiences.
They said that the former administration squandered public money only to come up with “cloud garbage.”
Meanwhile, Taipei’s Department of Information Technology was accused of failing to make public the cost-benefit analyses of the applications.
In response, the department said the city government had formulated a standard procedure regulating the procurement, marketing and withdrawal of mobile applications, adding that all government units are required to submit a software use report on a monthly basis.
A software review was held every three months by the previous administration, and the city government would order the improvement or removal of underperforming applications, the department said.
The design for the National Games app was complicated, factoring in venue management and the broadcast of competition results, which increased the development costs, the department said.
The CooC-School app was aimed at a limited group of people, which accounted for its download count, the department added.
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