Security News > 2020 > February > The postmortem: Shadow took lots of shortcuts with Iowa 2020 caucus app
The Iowa Democratic Party did not train volunteers on how to use the 2020 caucus app from tech company Shadow, but that was not the only problem with the process.
Here is a postmortem from software developers and business leaders on what went wrong with the rollout of the Iowa caucus app.
Mada Seghete, founder of Branch, said that it appears that Shadow made several risky decisions in building and releasing the caucus app.
Seghete said an app could have been a good choice for this use case but Shadow skipped the app review process baked into the App Store and the Play Store approval process.
Brain Foster, a senior vice president at MobileIron, said that it appears that the caucus app was overly complicated and required too many steps to log on, including email and password, two-factor authentication, and a precinct PIN. Foster also said that a new app takes between six and nine months to develop, not two.