https://tech.newstatesman.com/coronavirus/australia-centralised-app-will-uk-be-next

Despite ministers’ repeated assurances that Australia’s Covidsafe contact tracing app was functioning well, the government has finally admitted that the app doesn’t work properly on iPhones. The agency in charge of the app has signalled the likelihood that it will need to integrate Google and Apple’s decentralised framework in order to ensure the app runs continuously on iOS handsets. This could signal trouble for the UK, which has also opted for a centralised app – will it be next to shift to a decentralised approach?

Apple and Google are developing a decentralised framework for Covid-19 contact tracing apps that will be able to run seamlessly in the background while other apps run in the foreground or the phone is locked. Ostensibly due to privacy concerns, the companies have said that only contact tracing apps that adopt a similarly decentralised architecture will be able to run in the background of handsets running iOS and Android (i.e. pretty much every handset).