Blog posts from POLRI Super App (#polri-super-app)
Berdoalah untuk saya…
Semenjak saya terakhir kali menulis tentang serentetan masalah aplikasi pemerintah, dan ambisi pemerintah yang ingin menjadi Gojek, saya memutuskan untuk diam berbulan-bulan. Sejujurnya, saya bisa saja melanjutkan serial postingan tersebut, karena hari demi hari ada hal-hal rahasia yang sudah mencuat kepada publik. Tak sedikit juga asumsi saya tentang aplikasi pemerintah terbukti benar. Karena sesuai hikmat Tekotok, di negeri kotok ini siapa yang mengkritik aplikasi pemerintah BAKAL DIANGKAT JADI DUTA APLIKASI PEMERINTAH!!!!!! Tapi keterlibatan saya dalam aplikasi pemerintah yang berikutnya ini justru membuat saya cukup sadar betapa salah arahnya pemerintah dalam berbagai hal. Ada yang baru saja menunjukkan RUU kepada saya bahwa Komisi Penyiaran Indonesia ingin mengawasi situs apapun yang menggunakan fitur live streaming (padahal kasus seperti ini seharusnya lebih cocok dalam pengawasan iklan video), konspirasi pemblokiran situs Bit.ly, pemblokiran layanan Statically (salah satu produk dari rekan sebangsa saya) dan sebagainya. Saya sudah lama jauh dari komunitas Rizky Salminen dan rekan-rekan, termasuk yang mengkritik pemerintah secara bertubi-tubi, dan yang memblokir saya di Twitter karena membuktikan meme “L+Ratio” telah terekam sejak era kitab Daniel pasal 5. Apapun itu, saya ingin mengirimkan pesan yang satu ini: [26] Saudara-saudara! Coba ingat bagaimana keadaanmu pada waktu Allah memanggil kalian. Cuma sedikit saja dari antaramu yang bijaksana, atau berkuasa, atau berkedudukan tinggi menurut pandangan manusia. [27] Sebab memang Allah sengaja memilih yang dianggap bodoh oleh dunia ini, supaya orang-orang pandai menjadi malu. Dan Allah memilih juga yang dianggap lemah oleh dunia ini, supaya orang-orang yang gagah perkasa menjadi malu. [28] Allah memilih yang dianggap rendah, hina, dan malah yang dianggap tidak berarti oleh dunia ini, supaya Allah menghancurkan yang dianggap penting oleh dunia. [29] Dengan demikian tidak seorang pun dapat menyombongkan diri di hadapan Allah. 1 Korintus 1:26-29 BIMK Saya bukanlah Menteri Komunikasi dan Informatika yang sering anda hujat, namun orang-orang seperti saya- (dan juga Anda) -lah yang justru menjadi solusi bangsa, apalagi jika bangsa itu sangat bergantung kepada “Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa”. Dan melihat tren kebobrokan pejabat-pejabat pemerintah dalam 2 tahun terakhir, kepercayaan saya semakin kuat terhadap Daniel 5, yang membuat saya diblokir seseorang di Twitter. Kalau Anda benar-benar percaya bahwa Tuhan-lah yang memegang segala kuasa, Anda juga harus percaya bahwa Tuhan sanggup menghancurkan mereka yang korup, dan Tuhan akan menaikkan orang-orang yang tak layak secara hukum untuk memalukan mereka semua yang di atas. Mereka yang berpesta pora, dan yang memperalat Tuhan dan agama, semuanya akan ditangkap dan dihancurkan oleh Tuhan. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Ufarsin.
When Indonesian governments tried to be the Gojeks of their own...
Alright, those who complained regarding with Jakarta Smart City team and Jabar Digital Service, the government finally built an in-house design and development team for digitalization. Hooray! And now, let's see how existing government institutions are trying to become the Gojeks of their own. Before we convinced POLRI to have one. Case Study 1: JAKI (Jakarta Kini) JAKI was initially launched as almost looking like Gojek, with the exception of the top carousel that obscures the resemblance. Its purpose is well, to replace the existence of Qlue as endorsed by the previous mayor of Jakarta and to build an integrated Customer Response Management (CRM) and of course, a superapp. However, its initial days were plagued with one main issue: the need to install another app to access specific feature as advertised on the app, such as e-library. Well, this is definitely does not make JAKI a super-app. No. Instead, this makes JAKI to be yet another App Store of the provincial government of Jakarta. The good news is that these annoying things are finally removed for good, so all of these features: are now all available in-app (despite some are cheating with WebViews). Good job! Case Study 2: PeduliLindungi Ah, yes, the national COVID-19 contact tracing app wouldn't be made without "some" inspiration from Gojek. At the time of this writing, PeduliLindungi is capable of vaccine registration, vaccine certificate, travel permits, public area check-ins, and all the health-related information you need during the case of the pandemic. And they are currently expanding their plans to support beyond COVID-19, like child immunization and personal medication reminder tool. I can personally imagine if Gojek didn't exist. This gigantic app would be split into 5-10 individual apps, like the case of the Semarang government. Yeah, I mean this one: Like Semarang, there would be a dedicated app for contact tracing, a dedicated app for COVID-19 vaccination, another one for immunization, another one for e-HAC (health-based travel permits), and another one for public health information. Each of them is a dedicated CRUD service, so they could have been split according to the government's and tender winners' old mindset. Thinking beyond than just being "the Gojek of POLRI". Sure that, there are now many, many examples of government institutions are being "Gojek, but government official app for something and something and something" Like West Java's PIKOBAR, "PeduliLindungi, but for West Java and white and green", which PeduliLindungi itself is "Gojek, but for COVID-19 public management and white and blue". It's important for us, as well, that our main purpose of building POLRI Super App is not to be another "Gojek, but POLRI and dark blue". There's something that we would like to do more than that, but unfortunately, it's one of our trade secrets 🥲. But looking back at one of Gojek's own statement, A Super App is many apps within an umbrella app. It’s an Operating System that unbundles the tyranny of apps. It’s a portal to the internet for a mobile-first generation. https://www.gojek.io/superapp The true essence of a "super app" is not cloning the features of those famous apps who present a grid of features right on the front of the home page. Or to follow the "digitalization in the Industry 4.0 era" thing. No. But it's building an "operating system" that works on any operating system which unites the entire Police Force and the people to be collaboratively predictive, responsible, transparent in enforcing laws and honoring justice. Yep, precisely this one: "Works with any operating system?" Yeah, POLRI Super App still depend on Android and iOS, as well as Linux servers and Windows workstations used by the vast number of POLRI's individual regions, departments, and units. We are making a "meta operating system" that again, works on any operating system. You can look at Android, BlackBerry, GNOME, iOS, KDE, macOS, or Windows and see how integrated their system apps are. For example, your created Tasks or Reminders or To-Do can be shown in another app called Calendar. Or you can set up widgets so both your important tasks and events can be shown right on your desktop. When translated into the Indonesian government's digital services, we should make a system that combines existing CRUD services together, and not just that, allowing future POLRI app developers to integrate their CRUD services with us! Hence, we're not just building an app. We're not just building a meta-OS of our own. We're also responsible to build apps within an app, digital services within a digital service, integrated CRUDs within a CRUD. Who knows that we actually built a dedicated no-code platform, specifically designed for the Police Force? That's real, and the app is just the tip of the iceberg.
POLRI, meet Gojek.
And you might be asking? How was POLRI before the era of POLRI Super App? The Indonesian Police Force consists of many, many autonomous regions and units, which we can divide by 2 factors: what they do and serve as, as well as where do they operate. Take their headquarters in South Jakarta for example, where they have dedicated units for headquarter management (Yanma), public relations (Humas), and of course, their IT department (TIK POLRI). TIK POLRI is what we currently work for to coordinate the digitalization of POLRI services in our POLRI Super App. However, that central headquarter isn't the only headquarter POLRI have in the Republic of Indonesia, we have many, many regional headquarters ranging from POLDA (Provincial), POLRES (City or Regency-based), and POLSEK (District-based) services. In many cases, each POLDA and POLRES may have individual apps and digital services, which again are often made through this traditional practice of digitalization bureaucrazy. The result? Many local software houses, or should I say, tender winners, duplicated their own apps for use between POLDA and between POLRES all across the entire POLRI. Like this software company who mostly puts internal Police Force apps into their portfolio. And they seem still proud of it. In POLRI, I've heard that they already have at least 200, or even 400 (according to some rumors) individual apps and digital services running on the entire country. If each app is essentially a CRUD and at least have a dedicated Sign Up and Log In (SULI) features, then how much time is wasted to develop SULI features hundreds of times? These are the three main problems currently faced by, not just many, but any Indonesian government instances. These issues will definitely continue to exist in the future. However, there was an app, made by the minds of the Indonesian people, who finally teaches the government on how to do this "digitalization in the Industry 4.0 era", in the right way. Gojek, the local super app that (also) breaks government conventions. And here comes the classic, seemingly unrelated tale of Gojek. Originally founded in 2010, with official app first released in 2015, Gojek has become a trendsetter of its own. Its "you can also deliver stuff and order food right from our motorcycle driver network" thing have caused GrabTaxi (now Grab) and even Shopee, Traveloka, and AirAsia to have one. Its super app ambitions, and the record for being the first unicorn startup in Indonesia, have encouraged and made every local startup to be unicorn as well 🦄 Oh right, one of the Gojek's motto here is "Build startups within a startup". And one of the most epic moments, its big mobile app redesign in 2018 have finally made everyone wanted to be their own Gojek. I'm not kidding. Like, this is what Grab used to be back then. But since Gojek announced the new app design, Grab suddenly ended up like this. When DANA escaped from its home from BlackBerry Messenger with the launch of their dedicated app in 2019, this is entirely looks like the same Gojek design from 2018, despite blue. When state-owned banks and financial services agree to merge all their digital wallet apps into LinkAja in 2019, it certainly looks like Gojek, despite red. And, OVO, who was looking like this: ...ended up being this instead. So hear me out, EVERYONE. NOW. WANTS. URGES. TO. BE. GOJEK. And as private companies are trying to become more and more like Gojek, the Indonesian government finally start to realize that something is really, really wrong with their own apps. To list some issues: Government institutions are still stuck under "one app is only good for one CRUD service" mindset. Gojek, however, almost already had 20 services contained in one single app. So this isn't just all about building simple CRUD projects, right? Gojek, despite having substantial number of services, never got very bad app ratings in App Store and Google Play. At least not reaching below 2.5 stars. But many government apps still fall under the same landfill. Gojek build things mostly at their own expertise. By the way, have you read Gojek's official blog posts?No, not about that tasty GoFood and GoPay promos, but how they tackle and battle against their old codebase, aptly named Stan Marsh?I personally recommend reading Gojek Design/Tech/Engineering blog posts, they're great at explaining and experimenting at things. And finally, Gojek influences everyone to change. From the online drivers movement, rise in food delivery, new opportunities for cloud kitchen, up to that 2018 UI that makes it so original, to the point that other local apps are now start to look the same. Gojek have collectively taught us how to transform the Indonesia's digital economy and society, magnitudes of "better" than their own government. And so, the government shall learn and change how they approach their long-dreamed digital transformation, with all the right fundamentals and steps.
Indonesian government apps: Why do they suck?
There are many, many reasons, varying from human resources, management, UI/UX design, testing, operations, maintenance and more. But the biggest problem of all is the government itself! And here are six main things which I've summarized from hundreds of today's government app issues. Reason 1: Rapid outsourcing instead of growing and fostering the development team. Take that 1-starred M-Paspor for example. If you asked, "where are the developers behind this app so I can blame them for things?" The only answer I can say is well, they may be gone after the app's finished. Many Indonesian government bodies have outsourced developers from software houses, often offering affordable prices. And unfortunately, many of them are only focused on releasing these apps quickly and economically, but not willing to maintain them in the long term. Because of course, once the contracts are over, they're no longer obligated to maintain the app. It's all back to the government who decided whether to start another contract with them, or find another software house to continue their project. Reason 2: "Digitalization is optional" for some, just like Depok City. I have to agree with Mr. Yudianto's "cherry-on-top" comments regarding these apps. Some regional governments just made these apps feel great just to fulfill promises from their leaders' campaigns during the last election. And even worse, in case that these apps are down, many still believe that they can still return to pen-and-paper administration. https://twitter.com/fransallen/status/1463410005193883648?t=Q762AphooYZMmTzptmv0EA&s=19 Even the government of Depok still require traditional signatures in this era of digitalization. Reason 3: Overbranding, juxtaposing "electronification", "digital transformation", and "digitally serving the millenial generation" too much. Of course, I have a few examples here, but let's learn from the case of Sukuk Apps which you can download today from App Store and Google Play. By the way, since Google Translate can't understand what "sukuk" is, it's all about Sharia-bound state obligation investment. The app contains so much jargon which I don't understand, assuming that I never learned about English before. Like a bunch of mixed Indonesian and English terms if I set my default language to Indonesian. Do I feel very Jaksel to you? Another issue worth pointing out is the "e", as in "madness". Those e-e-ification on the bottom app bar tabs are pretty scary. Like "e-Market" which I simply assume to be yet another e-commerce like Amazon and Tokopedia. Or "e-Survey" which allows me to create online forms just like what I can do in Google Forms and Typeform? Alright, Ministry of Monetary, I know you're promoting the electronification of your service. But this is not what should be done. Like, on that homepage, "Underlying ..."? What message would you like to deliver with that truncated text? Reason 4: Bureaucrazy and their conventional app development culture. It is important to note their bureaucrazy, not just bureaucracy, of planning the digitalization of their own services. Again, assuming that they thought they can still safely return to pen-and-paper administration, every Indonesian government apps and digital services are always made by third party developers, who are just lucky enough to win official tenders from central and local governments. Their motivation? Build apps ASAP so we can digitalize ASAP! Well, I know, some of you might complain, mentioning the efforts of Jakarta and West Java provincial governments today, where they finally recruit dedicated teams for making apps. That's the latter part of the story, though, as even today we are still seeing this toxic culture still ongoing even in one of the largest law enforcement and public safety government organization in Indonesia. But well, for the rest of the governments, here's what conventional digitalization commonly look like: The government never excels in tech. But they do in marketing and election campaigns.That's why it's right, Mr. Yudianto, "Quality Assurance" and "UI/UX Designers" (almost) have no home at their annual job offerings. Because they don't understand the importance of them. So each year, the government estimates the funds first under their annual revenue and expenses allocation plan (APBD/APBN). The government then opens several projects up for tender. Software houses apply as candidates. The government may or may not know how to select a good candidate. So they either picked up randomly, or look at each portfolio, or choose because there are some recommendation from their personnels, aka. "orang dalam", between the tender winner and the government. The government creates and gives contracts to the software house. And as many software houses do, they quickly agree. The government may have little or no understanding on how their outsourced project managers are doing well or worse. Especially because of (1), the government never excels in tech. That is why many project managers "tried all their best", meeting everything what the government do as written in contract, despite the latent lack of programmer's soft and hard skills. Project managers, often crushed with deadlines and frustration with the government itself, forcing every member to speed up their work. That's why, no wonder these programmers (and often designers) start to ignore quality for the sake of "rapid digitalization", as I can summarize. "As long as I can still get money from it, why not just stick with PHP?" Or CRUD? or just not innovating at all while repeating their average skills just for money? https://twitter.com/pr0ph0z/status/1424030988594675713?s=20&t=zdmVQDE_PFVD0OISaT3AkA https://twitter.com/cahyadi_es/status/1424036633553166339?s=20&t=zdmVQDE_PFVD0OISaT3AkA Once the project either meets the finish line or the deadline, the software house will definitely consider that the app is "done", despite all the issues and the crunch their workers have done. The government then spends lots of marketing energy. Be it another press conference, another news article mentioning "digital transformation", or whatever the government could enforce because they are the government. Months after release, users start to complain things to the government related to their apps. Government's response: "Thank you for your response, we will try to improve our app" despite the contract is no longer in place. When netizens declared war against the (performance and quality of) government apps, there's another group of netizens "defending the app". This article should have been released on July 2022, right during the press release of POLRI Super App, but I decided to hold that for so long because of the rise of these tweets: https://twitter.com/itstigatiga/status/1544305595309690881?s=20&t=zdmVQDE_PFVD0OISaT3AkA https://twitter.com/Raider49703334/status/1544324994532245504?s=20&t=zdmVQDE_PFVD0OISaT3AkA https://twitter.com/18kabar_NSTR/status/1544586041369038848?s=20&t=zdmVQDE_PFVD0OISaT3AkA And of course, because of this as well: Wait, I'm not done yet! The government ended up choosing one of the three possible options: Renegotiate with the tender winner to extend their contract, Or hold another tender and back to Step 3, Or hold the improvement project entirely due to financial issues, so they may continue at the next year(s) and return to Step 1. Fortunately, after the initial app release in July, POLRI decided to choose Option 1. At the time of this writing our team is still improving on things, including the depreciation of earlier PolisiKu and Digital Korlantas for the sake of POLRI Super App. Reason 5: The fight between tender winners. Tender winners also tend to compete with each other, too. And you guessed it, for winning more projects and money. Even during the first cases of COVID-19 entering Indonesia, governments and tender winners decided to declare a great war. No, not the great war of fighting the pandemic. But the great war of fighting to be the best, winning COVID-19 superapp in Indonesia. This is, no joke. There are competing tender winners working at about projects to build individual COVID-19 information, contact tracing, and public control apps in Indonesia. Long story short (from my own Twitter thread), there are at least 6 projects from unrelated teams: PeduliLindungi from the Telkom Indonesia group, Bersatu Lawan COVID-19 (BLC-19), in which many of their veterans are joining into POLRI Super App, 10 Rumah Aman from the Ministry of Communication and Informatics (KOMINFO), Jakarta Tanggap Corona and JAKI from the Jakarta Smart City (JSC) team, Pusat Informasi dan Koordinasi COVID-19 Jawa Barat (PIKOBAR) from Jabar Digital Service, aka. the JSC of the West Java Province, Heck, even the Surabaya City Government created an Android app ("Surabaya Lawan COVID", not released to Google Play Store) which is shortly discontinued. Did you understand what I mean? Indonesia's Regional Autonomy laws fragment the effectiveness of these apps. Some apps are only good for their region, only, while the first three apps seems to compete for unknown reason. And I've contributed to the BLC-19 project as well, I have to admit that, I "hacked" PeduliLindungi for the sake of BLC-19's plans for creating an integrated dashboard for governments. That includes dismantling the APK to extract all possible endpoints from the PeduliLindungi's servers, and because I've noticed that an earlier iOS version of the app contains an accessible network debugger - which I can finally get their API keys! Wait, didn't you get the joke? I've hacked the Indonesian government for the sake of the Indonesian government! Fast forward to today, and this competition still exists even after the POLRI Super App's launch. Digital Korlantas (an earlier Police Force app for traffic and driving license management) are still being marketed to the public today, even though that we're (yes, on behalf of the greater TIK POLRI team) planning to deprecate the app in favor of POLRI Super App. https://twitter.com/khunxwhite/status/1587815218796953601 Reason 6: And lastly, their long-standing "one app is only good for one CRUD service" principle. This principle, if I'm not mistaken, drives back to the days of Symbian and Java feature phones. They are limited in capacity and capabilities, so there's no such thing as "superapps" in their limited app ecosystem. The Indonesian government, or that tender winners, tend to bring this principle forward into the era of smartphones. Their minds weren't enlightened with the ways of superapps, or at least, "modular app ecosystems" like LINE with all their web-based mini-apps (before they finally grew up into a dedicated super app). This is why the Semarang government decided to do that. Wait, what again? This list of 40+ apps which even my friends at Semarang didn't knew they existed. And this is exactly what they did! There's an app to book tickets for events in Semarang (Semartix), there's another two to provide feedbacks to the city government (E-Pokir and Lapor Hendi), there's also one to let residents and visitors to join the Semarang Great Sale craze, and there's one for citizen administration (Dukcapil / Si D'nOK) and so on. Even though that most of these apps are no longer available in the Google Play Store. But today, do you even bother to free up more phone space just so you can install all of these apps to get "the best Semarang City experience" in your whole life? Yet I believe if apps like Gojek and Traveloka didn't exist today, the quality of Indonesian government apps will still remain the same.
Building a sustainable app ecosystem for the Indonesian Police Force (POLRI).
We all have to admit that the Indonesian government is infamous for having poor quality apps and websites. Or at least, if we're discussing about this 5 years ago. User experience (UX) designers will be mad when reporting taxes on our electronic tax filing website, https://efiling.pajak.go.id. https://twitter.com/arieare/status/436649611927638016?s=21&t=cIY0FKj5It0l4zKLdxFODA https://twitter.com/reinhart1010/status/1434219937657024515?s=21&t=cIY0FKj5It0l4zKLdxFODA And of course, we're all familiar with 3-star, or even 1-star, Indonesian government apps for no longer being maintained anymore. Ratings for M-Paspor by Ministry of Law and Human Rights (Kemenkumham), Republic of Indonesia Also many citizens of Semarang City (not the Regency) who are still unaware of these 46 apps released by their government? And finally, many of these government apps ended up being Android-exclusive because the developers behind them can't even afford a fresh new Mac and a $99/year Apple Developer Account. On Tuesday, July 5th, 2022, the public screamed for witnessing a launch of another government app. "Come on, we've had enough poor quality apps at Wkwkland. And here's another one to end up in the same 3-star landfill?" There is a gap here. Our government's digital products are still considered by them as the cherry-on-top that makes their chaotic service look beautiful. Has the government taken seriously the role of the digital world in governance? This is not just about the central government, but also every department and local (province, regency, city) government. After all, they really like to release their own applications. Prabu Yudianto, "Logika Pemerintah 4.0: Bikin Aplikasi Banyak, tapi Nggak Terawat" (https://mojok.co/terminal/logika-pemerintah-4-0-bikin-aplikasi-banyak-tapi-nggak-terawat/) So what if I told you that this next government app is not just an app, or even a "superapp" by their own terms? What if I told you that this app is partly a gabutation. Yes, yet an official, high-quality gabutation of Reinhart. Also brought to you by the team behind Bersatu Lawan COVID-19 (BLC-19). Before we continue further, there are two important things that we will need to discuss. First is why many of these apps still suck, and how we overcome these issues in the best, possible way. And while the BLC-19 app itself has been brought down to the same landfill in favor of PeduliLindungi, ministries of the central government are still using our internal, integrated dashboard not just to monitor new cases, but also tracking down future possibilities of the COVID-19 case spikes. This blog post is very long. And indeed, it is now the longest blog post I've ever written in my life. That's why we decided to split this into 6 sections. Check out this site later because, well, I'm still not finished writing it yet. Page 1: Introduction. Page 2: Why do they suck? Page 3: The POLRI's current case of digital service fragmentation. And the point when everyone just wants to be [REDACTED]. Page 4: When the governments want to be [REDACTED], and how we tried to think beyond than just building a superapp. Page 5: My contributions and some trivias. Page 6: Conclusion and what's next. Of course, many of our great ideas are still covered in NDAs, so I also need to filter out these from our blog posts (unless if they are released).
