LONDON – A growing number of European countries are turning to the framework built by Apple and Google for their Covid-19 contact tracing apps. Amongst the countries to do this are Switzerland, Latvia, Italy, and Germany. Decentralized apps are also being developed in Estonia, Final, Ireland, and Portugal.
European Countries Turn to Apple-Google for Covid-19 Contact Tracing
It is thought that up to 30 percent of European smartphones run on iOS, with almost all the rest on Android. Working with the Apple/Google framework provides not just but privacy, but a higher chance of working. The first COVID-19 contact tracing app was in Austria, and that is now moving to operate on that basis.
As with everything during the Covid-19 outbreak, nothing is guaranteed. “The fundamental challenge will be if the second wave comes,” Ingmars Pukis, who is on the board of mobile network operator LMT, which is involved with the Latvian app, told Reuters.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland, the app is intended work alongside human contact tracing for COVID-19. Marcel Salathe, a digital epidemiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, said he hoped, there will be a strong overlap.
Germany plans to release its Covid-19 contact tracing app later this month. “There is no symptom sharing. No data collection. All data is pseudonymous,” Harald Lindlar of Deutsche Telekom explained. The UK has been testing a centralized app, alongside also working on the potential of moving to the Apple-Google model.