The government of Germany unveiled recently to the public releasing the source code of your application "Corona-Warn-App", which was created in order to help break the chain of coronavirus infections.
It is one of the many applications of this type that, according to European governments, will allow to relaunch travel and tourism in complete safety.
As the developers explain on the GitHub page:
«This project aims to develop a technology-based application with a decentralized approach, strongly inspired by the DP-3T (Decentralized Proximity Tracking to Preserve Privacy) and TCN and Privacy-based protocols and preservation of tracking specifications. Apple and Google contacts.
Like DP-3T and the TCN protocol, the backend applications and infrastructure will be completely open source, under the Apache 2.0 ″ license.
Application Corona-Warn is now available for Apple and Android devices. On the iPhone, it works from iOS 13.5 (latest version of iOS) which is available from iPhone 6s.
For phones Android, Bluetooth LE must be supported. Also, Android 6 or newer must be running and Google Play services must be activated, because the company does not provide interfaces through Android, but through these Google services.
“This application is not a panacea. It is not a free pass. But it is an important additional tool to help contain the pandemic, "Health Minister Jens Spahn said at a launch event.
Germany joins Italy, Poland and Latvia, which have launched applications based on technology from Apple and Google, which preserves confidentiality by saving Bluetooth contacts securely on devices.
The minister declined to say how many people would need to use the app. for this project to be considered successful. It also rejected a study published by the University of Oxford that claimed that such an application could only be useful if it was used by more than 60% of the population.
Spahn said that performance will also depend on how people use it to download the app, and he especially urged people on public transport to install it. Their participation would make a "qualitative difference," Spahn said.
The German government says the app cost 20 million euros to develop and you will need about 3 million
Sebastian Wolf (SAP), one of the developers of the application, tried to answer some questions from the Germans on Corona-Warn-App.
One asked why development costs so much and why not use an existing foreign application. You explained that this was mainly due to integration into the German healthcare system. Also, more details on this topic are provided in the application architecture repository.
Another wanted to know if the application also works in the background, that is, once the window is closed, and proposed, if this were the case, to leave an icon visible in the notification to show that it is active. The developer replied "yes, it works in the background."
Internet users seem to confirm his statements, as one of them says:
»The application regularly checks on the Internet if it has met a person who tested positive. Therefore, the application has minimal effects on the volume of data. I count about 6 KB per hour. Another to say: "The application consumes about 1,5MB per day."
Apart from this announcement, members of the European Union have agreed technical standards so that national applications can 'talk to each other', a step towards being able to trace infections across borders.
"As the travel season approaches, it is important to ensure that Europeans can use the app from their own country wherever they travel in the EU," Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a statement.
However, public enthusiasm for the app has been mixed; Last week's Politbarometer opinion poll for ZDF found that 42% of Germans intended to download it, 46% said no, while 8% did not have a new enough smartphone.
Source: https://www.dw.com
how will the app detect someone who is infected, unknowingly?
Beyond the technology used, since many people are asymptomatic.