New UK ID app yet again fumbles tech that Apple has already perfected

In a repeat of how it fumbled its costly and entirely failed COVID app, the UK is ignoring Apple Wallet and will instead develop its own digital wallet for documents such as driving licences.

The move to digital driving licences, passports, and so on seems so inevitable that Apple has been working on it for years. So it's no surprise that the UK is following the US's lead and implementing the same idea, yet it's not the surprise it should be that the country is going it alone.

In the official announcement, the UK government says that it is simplifying digital documents and in doing so to save the equivalent of $55 billion. The UK's economy has yet to recover from 14 years of a Conservative government that split the country from the EU, so saving money is clearly a priority.

It's just that the now Labour government could save quite a bit more by implementing Apple's existing system instead. Plus Google's Android equivalent, which also already exists.

Rather than that, though, the claim is that "Brits will be given the option to use a digital version of their driver's licence," and it will be in a new "GOV.UK Wallet" app. GOV.UK is the current website for all government issues such as paying tax.

It is important to note that this government is not the same one that lost COVID death statistics because it put them in columns in Excel instead of rows. It's also not the one that allegedly decided to develop its own COVID app in order to later harvest and sell data, but couldn't even get it to work.

So it's not the same government that spent $12.25 million developing that app before giving in and switching to Apple and Google's solution. And it's not the same government whose leader at the time, Boris Johnson, stood up in Parliament and said that there was no working COVID app "anywhere in the world so far."

He said that publicly at a point when countless US States and countries had long implemented Apple and Google's system. On that same day, Johnson could have downloaded a complete app because Germany made its version open-source.

So the UK has been through a bad patch with technology, and it should be unfair to assume it's going to do so again. But the announcement of developing its own app to save money, instead of using the existing free ones is not promising.

And speaking of promises, the UK government's new app "will be launched later this year." Don't bet on it — a 2020 study found that no UK government IT projects were even "highly likely" to be delivered on time.

In fairness, self-employed UK residents are using the GOV.UK website to pay their tax bills in January 2025, though. For first-time users, the sign-on is a complex mishmash of QR codes, mobile apps, and online, but it's quick and straightforward for existing users.

It's also of course a highly complex job developing a digital wallet app that's sufficiently easy to use yet secure. But then, that's another reason to use the tried and tested solutions from Apple and Google.