Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Investors3]

App behind Democratic Iowa caucus debacle was so rushed it lacked Apple App Store approval

https://macdailynews.com/2020/02/04/app-behind-democratic-iowa-caucus-debacle-was-so-rushed-it-lacked-apple-app-store-approval/

The now infamous app behind Democratic Iowa caucus debacle was so rushed that there was no time to get it approved by Apple for inclusion in the App Store. Therefore, the app had to be downloaded by bypassing a phone’s security settings, a complicated process for anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of mobile operating systems, much less many of “the older, less tech-savvy caucus chairs in Iowa,” as The New York Times describes them.

By caucus night, when it was time to put the app to use, only one-quarter of the 1,700 precinct chairs successfully downloaded and installed the app, according to a Democratic consultant who spoke to the NYT about the Iowa caucus debacle on the condition of anonymity.

The faulty smartphone app behind the chaotic aftermath of Iowa’s Democratic caucuses was the work of a little-known company called Shadow Inc. that was founded by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, and whose previous work was marked by a string of failures, including a near bankruptcy…

Given less than two months to build an app for reporting caucus results to the Iowa Democratic Party, Shadow produced technology that proved difficult to download and use and ended up delivering incorrect tallies. Iowa’s Democrats blamed a “coding issue” in the app, and the party said it would resort to a time-consuming manual tally based on information called in by precinct chairs or pictures sent on their smartphones — the same ones on which they could not make the app work.

With the wait on results dragging into Tuesday evening, many in the party began dissecting what turned the Democrats’ first contest of the 2020 election into a chaotic display, starting with Shadow, and its main backer, Acronym, a progressive nonprofit that is focused on helping Democrats regain their digital edge.

Founded in 2017, Acronym quickly became a darling of the Democratic donor class with its talk of restoring the digital advantage that the party had enjoyed under President Barack Obama, and that it was seen to have lost in Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign. David Plouffe, the well-connected former Obama campaign manager, joined Acronym’s board… Months earlier, it also quietly invested millions of dollars in a nearly bankrupt company called Groundbase, a tech firm that renamed itself Shadow soon after.

The firm had been founded by a pair of Clinton campaign veterans, Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis… Two people who work for Acronym, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to risk their jobs, acknowledged that the app had problems. It was so rushed, they said, that there was no time to get it approved by the Apple store. Had it been, it might have proved far easier for users to install.

MacDailyNews Take: To call this a clusterfsck in a clown car is an insult to clown car clusterfscks.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]