Governments and businesses worldwide deployed a variety of technological
measures to help prevent and track the spread of COVID-19. In Australia, these
applications contained usability, accessibility, and security flaws that
hindered their effectiveness and adoption. Australia, like most countries, has
transitioned to treating COVID as endemic. However it is yet to absorb lessons
from the technological issues with its approach to the pandemic. In this short
paper we provide a systematization of the most notable events; identify and
review different failure modes of these applications; and develop
recommendations for developing apps in the face of future crises. Our work
focuses on a single country. However, Australia's issues are particularly
instructive as they highlight surprisingly pitfalls that countries should
address in the face of a future pandemic