Writing apps for phones is not actually easy—and it is a lot harder with a billionaire breathing down your neck. That's what some city tech developers learned, at least, after Mayor Bloomberg reportedly tried to use the city's NYC 311 iOS app last February—and was so put off by the experience that, according to the Daily News's Juan Gonzalez, he lost it on his staff.
Bloomberg's disastrous app experience reportedly occurred on February 28 and his furor over it so great that a new version of the app—now with the ability to report homeless people vagrants sleeping on the street!—was on the App Store within weeks. Oh, and also? The whole thing might have led to the outser of one of the city's top tech execs:
His reaction so shook his aides that at an April 5 meeting of the city’s top technology executives, DoITT Commissioner Carole Post devoted a section of her PowerPoint presentation specifically to the mayor’s bad experience with the app and the ordered changes.
“What the Mayor wants, the Mayor gets...” was the title of one of Post’s slides.
This week, Post suddenly announced she was resigning after less than two years on the job. She is said to be out of the country on vacation.
Whether her departure was sparked by the 311 problems, or is a culmination of other technology upgrades that have come under fire, we may never know.
Meanwhile, the updated NYC 311 is still languishing. Despite much fanfare when it was released in 2009 the app has only been downloaded 23,000 times, according to Gonzalez, and has only been used 4,000 times to file a complaint (for comparison, between March 2003 and 2010 the 311 phone line was called more than 100 million times). Which is to say, you are probably still better off just calling (or texting!) 311.
