On Thursday, the UK government made its official application for contact tracking of coronavirus positive people, the equivalent of the Italian Immuni app, available to the public. The new app is called NHS Covid-19 (NHS is the acronym for the British health service) and is the second produced by the government.
The first had been developed last spring with similar timelines to the apps of other European governments, had been tested and then had been shelved because the tracking was not working properly.
The story of the first British app
The British government began work on creating a contact tracing app last March, in the midst of the pandemic. At the time, the idea of tracking contacts with an app on the phone was new, and governments around the world were evaluating numerous options and approaches, with the help and advice of companies and consortia of experts.
Within a few weeks, a certain consensus was created around the technology to be used to develop the various apps (Bluetooth), but other technical characteristics continued to be discussed. In particular, some consortia of experts preferred the creation of an app that used Bluetooth but adopted a “centralized” model, in which some anonymous citizen data are processed by a central server. Other experts instead preferred a “decentralized” model, in which a central server still exists, but its use is minimized, and the protection of citizens' privacy is maximized.
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Things to know about the coronavirus The Coronavirus Post newsletter updates you on the latest news: it's free and arrives every Thursday at 6pm: 00. To receive it, write your email address here and press the button below. Having read the information, I agree to send the Newsletter As early as March, we said, the NHSX, the technology section of the British health service, signed contracts to develop an app with Pivotal, a division of the American software company VMware, and also put internal resources to work. Like those of many other European countries, the app that the British government began to develop adopted a centralized model.
But things changed on April 10, when Apple and Google announced a joint project to integrate a contact tracking system (they call it “exhibition notification”) into their iOS and Android operating systems, which are installed on the vast majority of smartphones. . The two US companies decided not to make their own app, but to make programming interfaces available (in jargon they are called APIs) that governments, if they wanted to, could integrate into the various national apps.
Apple and Google, however, imposed strict conditions for those who wanted to use their APIs: the tracking apps would have had to adopt a decentralized system. Little by little, most of the governments of Europe, which were developing centralized apps, decided to change the system: Italy, Germany, Spain and others did.
The UK decided to stick with its initial project, snubbed Apple and Google, and continued to develop its app. There are reasons for this: a centralized system, while less respectful of citizens' privacy, gives governments more data to analyze in order to derive potentially useful information. Furthermore, some commentators raise issues of sovereignty: why should two Californian companies make such important decisions by governments around the world regarding the management of a global pandemic?
Thus, with similar timelines to those of other European governments, the United Kingdom developed its app and in early May started a limited trial on the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel, home to 140,000 people. The results of the experimentation were terrible: the app was easy to download, it activated, but it could not do what it was developed for, which is to make the phones of two close people exchange information via bluetooth. The app could only communicate with 4 percent of iPhones and 75 percent of Android phones. Apps developed with Apple and Google APIs recognize 99 percent of phones.
Weeks of controversy followed, and finally, on June 18, the government announced that the tracking app would be discontinued. According to government data, the development of the app set aside, including contracts with external companies and consultancy, cost 11 million pounds, about 12 million euros.
The government then developed another app, this time with Apple's and Google's APIs. He tested it in August on the Isle of Wight (again, as well as in Newham, London) and made it available on Thursday to all citizens of England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own apps ). In this way, the UK launched its contact tracing app three to four months later than other European governments (Immuni was launched in early June).
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NHS Covid-19, however, has ample scope to recover lost ground. For now, the data on downloads and the effectiveness of tracking apps in Europe are below expectations, in Italy and even in Germany, where the Corona-Warn-App has also been downloaded 18 million times. More than a million people downloaded the UK app on launch day.
Why the first app didn't work
As The Register site explained at the time of the first trial, the main problem was in the iOS operating system. The contact tracking apps, in fact, need to always keep the bluetooth active to exchange information with nearby phones and keep track, anonymously, of who we met and then warn us if this person has contracted the coronavirus (or vice versa) .
But the iOS operating system doesn't allow apps to keep bluetooth on all the time. To do this, Apple needs direct intervention with its exhibition notification API: this is why in the first British experiment, the app was able to recognize only 4 percent of iPhones. The low recognition figure of Android phones depends on other optimization problems that the Google API can solve.
