In the past few days, owners of the latest iPhone models have received a notification to update their phones, bringing them to version 13.7 of iOS, their operating system. In the information for the update it says that the new version “allows you to activate the notification system of exposure to COVID-19 without the need to download an app”. The message has led to some confusion and has led some users to think that Immuni is no longer needed. Not so: the application developed on behalf of the government for contact tracing against the spread of the coronavirus is still needed.
About ten days ago, Apple and Google announced that they had updated their system for tracking contacts via smartphones, adding new features that would have allowed governments to activate this function in their countries without the need to develop and manage a separate application. The change was decided above all to solve some problems in the United States, where so far few states have provided an app for tracking coronavirus exposures, without coordinating with others and therefore making it difficult to detect any contacts between a state and the other.
Before this news, Apple and Google had provided the basic mechanisms in their smartphone operating systems (iOS and Android), on which each government could then build its own application, as happened in Italy in the case of the Immuni app. However, developing and maintaining an application can be expensive, both in terms of costs and time, and for this reason Apple and Google have simplified it, giving the possibility to interested governments to invest few resources to create their tracking systems. of contacts via smartphone.
The novelty will be introduced in the coming weeks on Android while it is already available on iOS through its latest update, which has led to some confusion among users. The message that warns of the new features also specifies that “The availability of the system depends on the support from the health authority of the area where you are”, a wording that is not very clear especially for the less experienced or for those who do not know under what circumstances Immuni and similar applications were born in other countries.
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. To receive it, write your email address here and press the button below. Having read the information, I agree to send the Newsletter Italy was one of the first countries to have a contact tracking application, when Apple and Google were still working on a first version of the system to detect any exposure to the coronavirus via Bluetooth. Immuni was therefore born at a time when the standard was recently available and still to be perfected, with the construction of a customized system tailored to the particular needs of the Italian case. For example, the app allows you to report your positivity, in order to alert the people with whom you had come into contact, with the help of a health worker to verify the authenticity of the report. The system is integrated with information from the Ministry of Health and Civil Protection, and is designed to work in a more elaborate way than the system now proposed by Apple and Google.
To use an analogy, to be clear: Immuni is a haute couture suit, measured and sewn on the needs of the Italian government; the novelty recently offered by Apple and Google is a prepackaged dress from a clothing store. It does not mean that the second is less useful than the first or less effective, but in the Italian case it is superfluous because we have already equipped ourselves with a suit made on our needs.
For the tracking of contacts via smartphone in Italy, Immuni continues to be the only official application and an important resource for detecting any exposure to the coronavirus: it must therefore be kept on your smartphone as those who had downloaded it in recent weeks have done so far. The application is free, guarantees the protection of privacy (according to various experts much more than other apps that use our data) and can be downloaded through the App Store for iPhone owners and through the Google Play Store for those who use Android smartphone from version 6.
