Nearform, which created Ireland’s COVID-19 app, reached out to the US states.

• Ireland launched its contact tracking app on July 7, and within a week it had 1.3 million downloads, roughly 37% of the country’s adult population.
• NearForm, the company that created the app for the Irish Health Authority, has donated its code to an open source project.
• Other countries and US states have already asked for permission to update the app on their own, and NearForm told Business Insider that it started working with Pennsylvania authorities.
• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

Ireland’s COVID-19 contact tracking app has been so successful that officials in other countries, including the US, want to use it.

The Ireland app, which was released on July 7 and is called COVID Tracker, was developed by a software company called NearForm. It reached 1.3 million downloads in its first week, about 37% of people in Ireland over the age of 16.

A day after the launch of the app, NearForm CEO Cian Ó Maidín tweeted that the company had found “a solution for contact tracking for governments. The NearForm team can launch a national contact tracking system in one month”. On July 20, NearForm and the Irish Health Authority, the Health Services Executive (HSE), donated the code to an open source project called the Linux Foundation Public Health Initiative.

Governments have taken note. “There are several other countries and states in the US that are talking to our provider about app renewal and using that,” Fran Thompson, chief information officer at HSE, said in a statement.

NearForm confirmed to Business Insider on Tuesday that Pennsylvania is one of the US states that it called. State officials have started working with NearForm, the company said. The Pennsylvania Department of Health told Business Insider that the contract has not yet been finalized. “Any additional information that needs to be shared regarding our plans in a contact tracking application will be publicly shared in the coming weeks,” a department spokesperson told Business Insider.

Colm Harte, technical director for NearForm, told Business Insider that NearForm has been in talks with officials in the United Kingdom, which has yet to launch a contact tracking app that it promised would launch nationwide in May. “There has been a lot of collaboration and cooperation between different countries, including the UK, I have had some conversations with some of their technical teams to talk about how we configure our system and how we have approached the use of the Gapple API, that kind of thing” , said.

COVID Tracker uses the API released by Apple and Google in May (sometimes known as the Gapple API), and sends Bluetooth signals that other phones search for with the downloaded app. These signals allow phones to keep track of other nearby devices: If a user tests positive for the virus, HSE asks them to upload their record, and other users receive alerts through the app.

While 37% is a good penetration compared to contact tracking apps in other countries, questions remain as to whether the download rate will decrease and whether the app will be effective in slowing down the spread of the virus.

While other countries, including the UK, have said that contact tracking apps must reach approximately 60% of the population to be effective, NearForm and HSE don’t have a target for how many people want to download COVID Tracker.

“There is no such target number. Any impact this has is beneficial, so if even a handful of transmission chains are broken, it will be beneficial,” Harte told Business Insider.

Thompson added that the app “has already detected some positive cases.”

“Some of those were contacts that weren’t provided through manual contact tracking. These are people we never would have picked up.”