Another Trudeau swindle? ArriveCan app costs taxpayers $54 million and was completely hacked in less than two days

To critique Arrivecan’s eye-watering $54-million price tag, over the Thanksgiving weekend a single techie managed to duplicate the app in less than two days.
The endeavour was the brainchild of Lazer Technologies, a Toronto-based app developer that was among many in the Canadian tech sphere who were outraged to learn the federal government managed to spend $54 million on a relatively simple border screening app.
“The true cost to implement this shouldn’t have been this high — it should have been more efficient,” explained company co-founder Zain Manji in a blog post.
And so, Lazer initiated a “hackathon” among its employees to see how quickly it would take to replicate the entire app from scratch.
Developer Daniel Whiffing accepted the challenge, and by dinner time on Thanksgiving Day he had created a working clone of Arrivecan that is near-indistinguishable from the original. Whiffing even posted the code online so fellow programmers can check his work.
The company says that as soon as the clone app is approved for Google Play and the Apple App Store, anybody will be able to download their Arrivecan clone.
Lazer was careful to note, however, that throwing together a clone app is a much easier task than building one from scratch. “We need to have some empathy for all of the pieces outside of purely building the app and experience,” wrote Manji, adding “$54 million of empathy is unlikely though.”
On Monday, another Toronto-based tech company, Tribalscale, also announced that its employees had used the Thanksgiving weekend to replicate Arrivecan. Again, it only took about two days to deliver a pitch-perfect recreation of the app.

epaper.vancouversun.com/article/281539409861623

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