The number of active users of myGov increased to 20 million over the past year, up from 18.7 million in 2019-20, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) said.

The update to myGov's user count was revealed as part of the DTA's latest annual report [PDF], which added that the myGovID app's download count almost doubled to over 3.5 million downloads, while the number of digital identities created by Australians more than doubled from almost 1.3 million to 2.8 million.

The government agency attributed the growth to myGov enhancements, such as access to COVID-19 vaccination certificates, which are mandatory for going into stores and travelling overseas across many of Australia's states and territories.

"Through the enhanced myGov, customers can now access their COVID-19 vaccination certificates, which supports Australia's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and may become essential for reopening international borders," the DTA wrote in the annual report.

The DTA also revealed that the total amount of funds tied up in government IT projects amounted to$6.4 billion for the 2020-21 year. This consisted of engaging with 32 agencies across 79 digital and IT-enabled initiatives and advising 161 new policy proposals.

The DTA also received reports from 21 agencies for 165 reuse opportunities across 65 projects.

The annual report also provided information about Australia's use of the federal government's digital COVID-19 resources. According to the DTA, there were more than 39 million visits to Australia.gov.au in 2020-21, 4.2 million downloads of the Coronavirus Australia information app, and close to 1 million unique users of the WhatsApp channel, with some 20 million messages sent and received.

Earlier in the week, the DTA told Senate Estimates it became responsible for running Australia's COVIDSafe app on October 4. Prior to the agency taking it off the Department of Health's hands, the department had spent just shy of AU$9.2 million on the app, with Amazon Web Services picking up AU$2.77 million of that amount for hosting costs.

The DTA previously claimed it could get app's costs down to AU$60,000 per month once it was in charge of running the app.

The COVIDSafe app, once touted as digital sunscreen by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, currently has 7.7 million Australians registered onto it, which amounts to less than one in three Australians having the app. From that user base, there have been 1.65 million digital handshakes as of December 2020.

By comparison, New South Wales' check-in app Service NSW has had over 117 million check-ins as of March. Adoption-wise, almost all the state's adult population has downloaded the Service NSW app.

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