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The Corona warning app has been revised. The latest update improves the risk calculation. Additionally, users can now see when they have met people who have tested positive.
By Dominik Lauck, tagesschau.de
The developers of the Corona warning app have released an update that brings serious changes and is likely to initially cause confusion for several users. Version 1.9 now switches to the interface developed by Apple and Google: the “Exposure Notification Framework 2.0”. This means that encounters can be calculated more accurately, the developers said.
Anyone who is suddenly shown multiple risk encounters can find completely different numbers after the update. Because now multiple short-term encounters with low risk (green warning message), which were previously seen individually, can lead to increased risk (red warning message). Depending on the level of infection, this mainly affects encounters that lasted between 15 and 30 minutes in total, explained Hanna Heine from software company SAP, which developed the application together with Deutsche Telekom. For risk assessment, a single encounter is no longer decisive, but the sum of the risk minutes per day.
Change causes irritation
This change causes irritation, says Henning Tillmann, president of the digital political association D64. After the update, the number of low-risk contacts displayed increased from six to zero, he said on Twitter. “There will be a lot of people who will ask themselves in the next few days: ‘Is my Corona warning app broken?'”, Tillmann believes.
Therefore, multiple encounters that were previously displayed in green may no longer be displayed after the update, but are instead combined into a risk report classified in red. It is also not a bug, but a consequence of the new, more accurate calculation basis, the developers explain.
The application display changes
Also, the screen has been changed in the app. The number of encounters is no longer displayed, as was the case previously, but the number of days on which the risk encounters occurred. Also, if there are several higher risk encounters (red), the date on which the last higher risk encounter took place is displayed.
Additionally, the process from scanning the test result to sharing the diagnostic key has been improved, Heine announced. More users should be encouraged to share their diagnostic code and warn others with their positive test result. Because according to the Robert Koch Institute, which published the app on behalf of the federal government, only 54 percent of the app’s users share a positive test result. Almost one in two people refrain from warning their contacts.
So far there have been around 1.7 million app warnings
So far, the app has been downloaded around 24 million times. More than 110,000 positive test results were shared through the app. With 15 relevant contacts per user, almost 1.7 million people would have been warned, the head of the Chancellery, Helge Braun, recently calculated.
The application update will be “delivered in a controlled release,” as SAP announced. While iPhone owners can now download version 1.9 from the Apple App Store, Android smartphone owners have to wait “up to 48 hours” before the new version is available on the Google Play Store.
The app soon on older iPhones too
There is good news for owners of older iPhones where the Corona warning app could not be installed yet. Apple is now also making its “Exposure Notification Framework” available for the iOS 12.5 OS version, thus creating the prerequisite for the app to be able to run on Models 5 and 6 soon. According to SAP spokesman Hilmar Schepp, Deutsche Telekom and SAP are “working hard on the necessary adjustments with Apple.” It has not yet been determined when exactly the app can be downloaded on older models.
The application can be downloaded for iPhone from the App Store and for Android phones from the Google Play Store. A few days ago, a group of free programmers published the application for Android smartphones in an alternative version for devices without Google services. This means that the app can now also run on China’s Huawei smartphones, which have to do without Google services due to boycott measures by the US government, and on devices like the Fairphone 3 with the alternate operating system / e /, which is voluntarily available on Google Play. Services are waived. The variant is available from the free F-Droid app store and is called “Corona Contact Tracing Germany” to avoid name conflicts. It runs on all versions of Android from version 6 onwards.
