I see it's "All Hands On Deck" to defend #ABTraceTogether, with the Matts and the Minister going at it flat out trying to convince Albertans that the app is just fine.

It's not, and it never will be - here's why: #abpoli #ableg /1

At the end of the day, it's using iOS APIs in ways that they are NOT supposed to be used. _EVER_. This is a hard line in Apple's iOS environment.

I had a similar experience professionally a number of years ago which is illustrative as to why this is a bad idea. /2

At the time, the company I was working with was migrating our product to Windows, and the decision was made to use Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) with Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) for redundancy.

All of this is fine - in fact both choices made sense. /3

Then someone decided that our own redundancy software had to control MSCS and MSSQL directly and spent a significant amount of time attempting to crowbar WCS into behaving the way our software did. /4

Except they didn't take in the little detail that WCS didn't do "demand fail over" quite as expected. It took it as a request, and would then proceed to ask MSSQL if there was any reason to fail over. If there wasn't it would refuse to do so. /5

No amount of tweaking of our software would change this behaviour - basically MSCS took ownership of it and said "nah - we're not going to do that today", and it would result in all kinds of strange behaviours. /6

For the next number of years, my team spent somewhere around 30% of its time investigating failover problems associated with this design.

Every time, the logs would show exactly the same patterns, with predictable side effects. /7

Eventually, I looked at it and decided to change it by lobotomizing the connection between our redundancy software and MSCS - and just treat the clustered MSSQL as a service we talked to.

Once rolled out, the bug reports that were consuming 1/3 of my team's time disappeared. /8

So, what does this have to do with #ABTraceTogether?

Everything. The #TraceTogether platform is doing the same sort of thing - it is using API services in ways that they should not be used, and it runs into unresolvable behaviour problems. /9 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-covid-app-abtracetogether-apple-ios-functionality-issues-1.5799537

@shandro and his pet Matt, @SteveBuick2, can yammer on all they like about uptake, but underneath it all, there is a fundamental flaw in how the app does things that cannot be fixed by "tweaking" the software. /10

You do not fix fundamental design problems by "tweaking" things. The problem will come back and bite you on the ass.

Unlike Singapore, where most people use Android devices, in Alberta there are a lot of iOS users. Ignoring this reality doesn't make it go away. /11

The fix is to use to API that Apple and Google collaborated on for contact tracing purposes. This is what the Federal government's COVID Alert app does.

I don't care if it hurts the collective feelings of the @UCPCaucus and @jkenney or not, Alberta needs to get on board. /12