The rollout of a host of COVID-19 tracing apps has been described as a global digital experiment. This development has been followed by a proliferation of scholarship, analyzing and assessing the performance of these apps in fighting the pandemic . This includes discussions of their legal, ethical and technical properties, as well as more detailed investigations of the surveillance implications and the effectiveness of national initiatives. In this commentary, I am interested in what this experiment tells us about the digital transformation of health governance-and perhaps, also of governance, in general-at the national level.