COVID-19 tracing apps proving to be a tricky business around the world – Times of Oman

COVID-19 tracing apps proving to be a tricky business around the world – Times of Oman

Frankfurt: Developing a successful COVID-19 app has been seen as a kind of Holy Grail since the pandemic exploded around the world in March. Since then, many countries have developed their own apps in the hope that they can master digital contact tracing and get outbreaks under control quicker and more effectively than any team of human contact tracers ever could.

However, at the start of 2020, the concept of a mobile app aimed at containing a pandemic was not tried and tested. Many questions remain unanswered about the technology, effectiveness, functionality and arguably most importantly, the ethics of such apps.

What is already clear is that it's not an easy business. Germany's Corona-Warn-App had seemed to be making decent headway. As of July 24, the app had been downloaded 16.2 million times in Germany according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) “” accounting for an impressive 20 per cent of the population.

Yet that was the same day that tabloid newspaper Bild revealed that for five weeks, the app had not been working properly for potentially millions of users. Some Android operating systems had blocked the app from running in the background to save power, meaning its key function “” to send