Corona Warning App Revisited | Total Security Software

About two months have passed since the German Corona warning app was published. The app has received quite a bit of attention, both in a positive and negative sense. I will try to take a more differentiated look at some of the points.

I have on June 16. Installed my Corona warning app in the morning, another eight million users did that in the first 48 hours. At the beginning of August there are currently almost 17 million installations, with the number is almost evenly distributed between Android (9 million) and iOS (8 million). The number of installations is currently starting to stagnate, which means that in July there were only around 3 million new installations.

Number of downloads of the Corona warning app via the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in Germany from June to August 2020 (in millions:

Who Downloaded the App?

From the point of view of the spread of the devices in the population, the owners of an iPhone seem to show significantly more sense of responsibility than the Android users. Because according to the usual key figures, Apple's market share is just under a third compared to Android devices. Of course, it is also possible that the number of Android devices suitable for the app is significantly lower than the number of existing devices. There are a lot of Android versions or Huawei devices that do not support the Exposure Notification API via the Play Store. An evaluation of the user base is therefore pure speculation.

Did the App Work Properly at All?

Recently you could follow a discussion in many media about whether the Corona warning app is working properly at all. Basically, there have been problems here. I also experienced certain bugs with my installation.

If I look at the whole thing without the criticality of the corona pandemic and with over 20 years of IT experience: There weren't any really big ones for the fact that both the API on the device side and the app for the end-user were newly developed Problems. Few apps go up as steeply in the number of installations as was the case here without a real pilot and beta phase. Of course, in the context of encounter tracing during the corona pandemic, it is much more difficult to bear if a central component of the relaxation strategy does not work reliably than is the case with any trivial game apps.

My Experience with The Installation

My iPhone installation of the Corona warning app also greeted me after ten days with an ENErrorDomain error 11, which, however, disappeared for me after a reboot of the iPhone. A few days, with the achievement of the 14th anniversary of the acquisition, were later, but then suddenly my exposure Notification- data empty, so I returned on June 30, started new, have to collect encounters. Since my range of motion was still clearly limited at that time, very annoying, but not a drama for me personally. And if you follow this bug more closely, it was not, strictly speaking, a bug in the Corona Warning app itself, but a bug in Apple's API implementation. This was solved with iOS 13.6. From a professional point of view, I think this difference is important. The end-user doesn't care why the app isn't working. Apple also manages to unsettle the users of the app with an operating system message about the activity of the Exposure Notification API. However, this is only information that the tracing is activated and has nothing to do with the app.

Does the App Run Reliably in The Background?

The second big challenge for the Corona warning app was and is, despite all the assurances of the app developers and the device and operating system manufacturers, the ability to run permanently in the background. Here everyone involved can probably share the blame for the problems. With Android, there are device manufacturer-specific optimizations to the Android operating system. But even with Apple, the app did not behave in the background as predicted by Apple and the app developers. The recommendation today is therefore to actually open the app once a day to be on the safe side, regardless of the operating system. At Apple, you can be pretty sure that there will be solutions with the appropriate updates will give. How manufacturers of Android devices deal with necessary updates is usually not reliably predictable.

QR codes vs telethon

A number of all teleTANs issued via the hotline to verify a positive test result in the Corona warning app in Germany in July and August 2020:

There is another point that started a bit jerkily from the IT point of view  and is still not running smoothly today: The connection of the laboratories to the digital systems to issue the QR codes to report the infection. Telekom has made some progress in this area in the last few weeks, but today it is primarily the large laboratories that are connected to the digital process. The analogue replacement process via the so-called teleTANs is not optimal in terms of data protection, as the personal data of the infected are briefly in the Telekom call centre must be recorded. According to Telekom, these are then destroyed again after a short time; this is a paper-based process. About half of the laboratories are currently functionally connected, the goal here is to quickly establish a fully digital workflow.

Can the App Also Be a Role Model for Other Countries?

A key advantage in terms of transparency of the German Corona warning app was and is the underlying open-source model. Here are a few notable events.

The co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, who now lives in London, proposed on June 18, based on the German app, a corona warning app for the British and the National Health Service ( NHS for short) in a short time and at no noteworthy cost ) to provide. On this very day, the NHS had given up developing its own Corona warning app, which, however, also without the Exposure Notification API provided by Apple and Google should get by. While Prime Minister Boris Johnson still claimed on June 24th that no country had a working corona warning app. After this statement by Johnson, the tweet from Jimmy Wales was shared again increasingly. A week later negotiations between Germany and Great Britain were reported, currently, there is no information about a tracing app of the NHS.

Use total security to protect from Corona Warning App

The Belgian authorities, for example, are more specific. These will build the Belgian user interface based on the German platform and also create the corresponding infrastructures around it, i.e. name the responsible organization, as well as set up server infrastructures and telephone hotlines. Customize the app with local translations and logos in this project is only a smaller effort.

Will the German App Soon Become an E App?

The German corona warning app is now available in all EU app stores so that people from other EU countries who live and work in Germany can also take part in the encounter tracing. This is not yet a real functional coupling of the European warning apps. For this purpose, the EU Commission had already launched technical guidelines in mid-June, which should make it possible for the apps to really work together across borders. The basis for this is again the decentralized infrastructure and key formats as defined by Apple and Google.

At the end of July, the German operators and developers of the Corona warning app, Telekom and SAP, were commissioned to create the data exchange platform that enables the secure exchange of keys. A geo identifier is already provided for in the German distribution infrastructure. The exciting part, however, remains how the whereabouts are determined, since the apps that use the Exposure Notification API is not allowed to use the geographic functions at the same time. And there are several options: An encounter with an infected person in another EU country or you were infected in another EU country yourself. The technical concept of the EU takes this into account and defines the so-called network Mobile Country Code (NMCC for short) as a source for a country assignment or manual user entry as an option.

What's Next?

These measures are no longer effective for the large travel wave during the summer holidays. However, no one can currently foresee how long we will have to live and work under relaxed pandemic conditions. And the latest scientific models no longer postulate a wave-like occurrence of corona as long as there is no vaccine, but rather the model of a forest fire : The more combustibles there are in the vicinity, the faster the virus spreads, but firebreaks, i.e. distances, can reduce the speed of spread significantly lower.

In the next article on the Corona warning app, I will look at the technical details on the devices and analyze the download data.