You underestimate how important it is to (most, competent) governments to keep their citizens alive and how unprepared they were caught in this. This solution (if used) was better than flying blind and cost these governments nothing. It's not fair to pretend a government would not welcome contact tracing as-is if it helped provide a tool to stop the spread. Not everything a government does is out to surveil you, they have to still provide some other functions.
After a lid is on things though - yeah, maybe. Maybe they'll try to flip this, but not while their pants are down.
some waited, some didn't. I can't pretend to know why.
My personal guess/opinion is that those governments who's only objective was to get people isolated on exposure would at least have leaned towards the apple/google solution when it became available. Those who had ulterior motives (or had already rolled something out) would be less likely to wait for it.
One surprise for me here is Norway's initial implementation, which it later re-evaluated[1], you'll also see (at least at that point in time) that Bahrain and Kuwait did not. Bahrain even turned it in to a game show.
Edit: just to add, you'd see for example a place like Australia looking in to the solution once available, last paragraph here[2] - my opinion is that these countries do not feel threatened by their general populace, thus don't feel the need to turn everything in to a mass surveillance tool if they don't need to
> “ It doesn’t solve my problem because I will not use such an app, period.”
This is why I’d argue it should have been an OS update and you can’t opt-out (or at least default opt-in).
If you throw your phone in the trash so be it, everyone else will get privacy preserving exposure notifications. Paired with effective quarantine this may have stopped the spread and thousands of people who died might have lived.
You may want to throw your phone in the trash anyway since it gives away your location to the telecoms.
It doesn’t solve my problem because I will not use such an app, period.
It doesn’t solve the government’s objective of maximum data collection so they won’t use it.
The very idea of privacy conscious contact tracing is an oxymoron.