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UK virus-tracing app switches to Google-Apple model

127 points by csmattryder 6y ago

zpeti 6y ago
UK government seems to be behind everyone else on every policy decision on coronavirus. Win for privacy.
- Traster 6y ago
  That's what you get when you put fairly incompetent people in positions of power because they align with your political views. All the way back to having political advisors sitting on the "Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies" the first question has been about the politics of policy rather than efficacy.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Someone who is currently a cabinet minister did memorably say: "I think the people in this country have had enough of experts"
    - timthorn 6y ago
      The full quote continues: "...from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best, and getting it consistently wrong."
      - faemir 6y ago
        ...while trying to peddle absolute economic lies, which were called out by the independent UK statistical authority as misleading. In the same breath also lying about him not running a candidacy to be PM, declining to name any figures backing his assertions. What are you trying to say?
        lambdadmitry 6y ago
        That the quote is taken out of context, I guess. Other factors that you've mentioned don't change the fact.
        arethuza 6y ago
        HMG is also an acronym!
jjgreen 6y ago
I can't see Palantir being happy about that.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  To me that makes it very much a double win. Palantir of all people shouldn't have been anywhere near the NHS in the first place.
- peruvian 6y ago
  Good. One of the most evil companies out there.
djaychela 6y ago
I wonder how this will go down with Palantir and Faculty - I can't imagine this was in their game plan. I'm in the UK and I've almost given up on watching the news as it seems every step taken by the government is weeks behind where it should be, and taken in a reactive way, rather than there being any kind of proactive, coordinated response to the crisis. This is welcome, but months behind when it should have happened - plenty of discussion on here said the route they were trying to take wouldn't work for technical reasons, aside from one's of privacy. By the time this is up and running, it'll be irrelevant.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  > I wonder how this will go down with Palantir and Faculty. I wonder if I can have one day delivery on the worlds smallest violin.
- rezeroed 6y ago
  The whole thing is political (the two party system is a disaster). I don't think Boris wanted lock down or any other curbs on freedom - that's not in his character. I expect he would have preferred the Swedish approach, but he's trying to win over the left, which is fairly futile because they'll always find something to shout at him about.
  - toyg 6y ago
    > he's trying to win over the left That's... new. He got in power by courting the hard right. He nominated hardcore right-wingers to all key positions, and pre-covid was busy implementing a hard-right "no prisoners" approach to Brexit. And now he'd supposedly be leaning left...? I agree that he wanted to follow Trump in not locking down anything - but he had to change course after meeting resistance from scientists in the civil service, as widely reported, not from "the left". "The left" didn't even have an actual leader for most of the crisis.
    - rezeroed 6y ago
      The left includes Adam Boulton, Beth Rigby, Piers Morgan, the Guardian, the BBC, the people banging pots and pans on their balconies on Thursday evenings. Getting in to power and retaining power don't require the same strategy. Example, school lunches.
mattlondon 6y ago
This is a win for privacy - the previous model used a centralised "anonymous" database, with the idea being that the data could then be mined for various purposes officially relating to spotting outbreaks and the like. Obviously, this sounds very big-brothery since it would have been a database of who was where with who and when etc. Not sure if this sudden outbreak of common sense was due to either: a) technical difficulties of doing something hacky with iOS to try and make the background bluetooth approach work or implementing the backend, b) something else usurping the need for the data mining (e.g. perhaps the much-trumpeted track-and-trace system where people self-report/voluntarily tell the government who they spend time with) c) actually caring about people's privacy. Probably a combination of a + b I expect. c feels like a longshot.
- toyg 6y ago
  d) allowing them to leverage existing opensource code from the European efforts, without actually having to admit the dependency e) speeding up development, because of a) and d), which also means making it cheaper and less reliant on a single supplier f) the new guy in charge has some Apple contacts he might be able to leverage to, again, speed up things.
- tomatocracy 6y ago
  You could also add the potential that the pilot on the Isle of Wight led them to believe that app-based contact tracing is not really very helpful anyway.
zspitzer 6y ago
Is the UK app also geo-blocked to only UK based Apple/google Accounts like the new German app? https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android/issues/478 https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android/issues/47...
- robin_reala 6y ago
  This is actually a problem. I’m in Sweden, but as it’s really hard to transfer my Apple account from the UK (especially with a family account) I’ve never bothered. So am I going to not have access to Sweden’s contract tracing app if one is built?
  - alibarber 6y ago
    I have gotten a visa and worked in other countries with less effort than trying to move app store. I just don't get it. I now live in Finland, with a Finnish address and bank card and everything and I still can't get the damn thing to change. I refuse to accept that it is a technical impossibility to have a UK bank app and a Finnish one (for example) on the same phone.
    - jen20 6y ago
      My experience here is similar and not resolved after several years. My phone now now happily installs US apps (after starting in the UK) _except_ that it will not update the Google Fi app, but my watch with the same account complains every 15 minutes about being in the wrong store with no way to resolve it. I do have apps from both stores installed on my phone now (after a lot of trial and error), but believe there is a special place in hell _anyway_ for companies providing services like delivery who do not add their apps to stores globally (looking at you, Doordash). Do they think a tourist or business traveller never wants to order lunch to their hotel?
      - renaudg 6y ago
        A general rule of software is that any bug that a US-based developer or QA tester wouldn't easily be able to trigger can remain present for a very, very long time.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
The centralised approach is 'better' for the stated aims but it is harder to reliably develop. I suspect that they concluded that the whole system won't be ready soon enough (ideally it should have been deployed by now) and so they are switching to something they can deploy faster. In any case I suspect that these apps will make very little difference because they will come too late, not be used widely enough, and provide too little actionable data.
underdeserver 6y ago
So Germany and the UK, right? Any other countries using this already? Preliminary data?
- toyg 6y ago
  FTA: "The UK follows Germany, Italy and Denmark among others" Also: " the European Commission said that France - which had adopted a centralised app - would face challenges in this regard." I think we will inevitably see most developed countries falling in line. On the other hand, I expect the likes of Hungary to go "centralized".
JamesBaxter 6y ago
Is this the real reason why the app seemed like it was suddenly going to be delayed? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340
plantain 6y ago
I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country. They're still debating a quarantine for new arrivals, contact tracing is yet to really start, testing lagged significantly... It's an island nation, it should have had a head-and-shoulders advantage over continental Europe with full potential for an outcome closer to New Zealand or Australia rather than the US or Brazil. What went wrong?
- toyg 6y ago
  > What went wrong? A government was elected to "get Brexit done", despite being patently (and provably) hopeless at everything else. Then "Everything else" suddenly became really important, and here we are.
  - rezeroed 6y ago
    No, it's because they don't really want all this fuss; forced hand. They're trying to get away with as little as possible - Sweden, but without looking like the Swedish approach because the left will scream.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      I think they were right about the screaming bit. Here in North America, we're doing alright. Canada got relatively lucky, timing the restrictions before the peak unlike so many other places. The U.S. overall rates of COVID death are dramatically lower than the UK and Sweden, and people still frame it like the President is a bloody-handed murderer who gets off on watching people suffer. Mexico made a big stink about things, and some politicians there even turned their noses up at the U.S. (still the country most likely to render aid) during its peak, but are going into a mass outbreak of their own, that is on a steady trajectory to kill as many or more than the U.S. one.
      - 6y ago
JoeSmithson 6y ago
The government had already basically eaten the bad press on the privacy aspects of their design vs the Google/Apple API... I wonder what prompted this. I know that the app used a kind of hack to allow for Bluetooth during sleep (something missing from the Aus app) - maybe they were told that was going to be patched out? I really think this must be related to it not working as intended rather than anything political.
- angrygoat 6y ago
  Yes - the Australian app has all sorts of hacky workarounds, at least on iOS, such as notifications once or twice a day which ask you to foreground the app and 'make sure it is running'. Hopefully we will get an update here to use the new APIs.
- mrkwse 6y ago
  The health minister overseeing it suggested it could be delayed until winter yesterday citing both concerns about public response to the method (which sounds like a bit of a vacant excuse) and unspecified 'technical challenges'.[1] I'd speculate that this is a case of the original technique not being a success on the Isle of Wight tests and a change of approach to lean on the device/OS manufacturers rather than try and work around them. [1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-contract-tracing-app-uk-nhs-a9571461.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-c...
  - Theodores 6y ago
    There is a certain stillborn quality to the app. I don't think the Isle of Wight has much to do with it. They got VMWare/Pivotal to write an app people could install on their phones and that was never updated. The NHSX GitHub repo of the code exists but there is little activity. A few updates to URLs in the documents is as far as it goes. A crypto coin project from a few years ago has a similar feel to the code. Nothing is going on. The symptoms were changed over the last few weeks to officially accept that loss of taste/smell was a defining characteristic. The app could have been updated to include this updated self diagnosis information. That would have at least indicated progress. But not even these basic updates have happened. Pull requests are few and far between. The ones that exist are not dealt with. Again, a sign of a project far from active. With software we all know that you can do stuff client or server side to a certain extent. We don't know how much of the server side of this app is built. I suspect they put a minimum effort app together just because. There is no evidence of it hooking up to call centres and contact tracing. The people in the call centres are allegedly idle. The public mood has changed and people are using their common sense rather than following government guidance to the letter. The opportunity for everyone to be running this app has gone. Only a change such as a requirement to have the app if using public transport or entering shops can make it an app people want to use.
mattlondon 6y ago
Interesting comment from the BBC article that I had not thought about before: > "make the app compatible with other countries' counterparts, which are based on the same system " So if multiple countries are using the Apple-Google system, we'll have an international system that anyone can use? I guess this bodes well for future international travel over the next 12/18 months (... or until the vaccines etc are ready) since we'd still get the benefits if we are in compatible countries.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  They aren't international by default, but enabling (opt in by the developer) interoperability is on the Google/Apple roadmap. It would be difficult to see how that would ever happen for an app not using the APIs.
amcoastal 6y ago
Or just don't download an app that is entirely useless in practice while being extremely problematic in many ways...
hubbabubbarex 6y ago
Oh who is stypid to take any government shaite in they phones.. Oh my. Google is enough to violate all my privacy.. No more racism from Google or any other they affiliates thanks
NCG_Mike 6y ago
Good. The NHS has a terrible history of software development.
- robin_reala 6y ago
  Leaving the app to one side, NHS Digital has been doing good stuff for the last couple of years: https://digital.nhs.uk/ https://digital.nhs.uk/
  - toyg 6y ago
    Which is why this government is keen to gut it and outsource it all to the likes of Babylon.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    They do, and there were good people working on this. That said, my suspicion is that they have good track records of working with open web stacks, and were somewhat less familiar with the realities of working with closed app platforms that relate to hardware integration, and that's where they came unstuck.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  The NHS aren't developing it, it's developed by a private company. If you mean that private companies developing for the public sector in shady deals have a terrible history, I'd agree.
jonplackett 6y ago
This is just yet another case of the UK government insisting they know best, continuing down a stupid path despite watching everyone else successfully walking the opposite direction. From locking down late, to stopping contact tracing early, to not mass-testing, to releasing infected people into care homes. Just pure arrogance / incompetence. (I'm British in case you wondered... sigh...)
- arethuza 6y ago
  Nitpick: Arrogance and incompetence - something we do so well!
  - nix23 6y ago
    Forget it...France is still number one, you silly tee-drinker ;)
- pmlnr 6y ago
  I voluntarily live in the UK as an EU citizen. Most countries have faults, these are the British faults. Germany won't act without a manual to follow, in Hungary you need direct permission from the maffia (also known as the governing party); choose your poison.
  - futurix 6y ago
    Well, the difference is that German manual tends to work in the end. Certainly worked for Coronavirus (so far).
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      There were a lot of bad editions of the manual throughout the 20th century.
      - unfunco 6y ago
        Godwin's law at work…
prepend 6y ago
“ And questions remain about whether any smartphone-based system reliant on Bluetooth signals will be accurate enough to be useful” This is the biggest question for me. I’m interested in the actual public health usefulness.
toyg 6y ago
This is a lot of noise about something that, unless it is made compulsory as some Asian countries have done, will likely end up like the Norwegian effort: 2% install rate and hence useless.
_Wintermute 6y ago
These comments have the expected pessimism from anything UK related, but after watching the disaster of France's home-grown centralised app this seems like a smart choice.
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
There is an interesting discussion to be had about contact tracing apps and choice of model, most of the internet and all of the press will not be having it. (Ill informed and barely remembered fragments that somehow Palantir / Cummings / Satan's niece was involved in this app are nonsense. Palantir is doing some internal data vis work and both apps are being built by the same team anyway) The first thing to consider is whether this has led to a real delay in roll-out. We don't know that so far, but we do know that they actually started work on an app based on the Google-Apple API more than a month ago and very few countries have done a full roll-out of an app based on that API yet (and those quite recently). We also know that these approaches work better after "full lockdown" because during the lockdown contacts are already massively suppressed. If it hasn't led to a delay, then the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth will be completely irrelevant. Optionality is good, the more things tried the better. The second is to acknowledge that one of the issues with the (very good idea) of partially or wholly anonymous contact tracing is that apparently people don't like receiving this news from an app interface. That makes an app which interfaces which the rest of the contact tracing system like the one that NHSX originally built a better bet. The third is to realise that there is as yet no evidence that these solutions work at all. We know that fully centralised contact tracing (which includes a geolocation tracking app) works in Asia. Nobody knows if either the fully decentralised DP-3T system developed by Apple/Google or the partially decentralised PEPP-PT/Robert system developed by NHSX will works. The fourth is that if you can make it work around phone OS restrictions, there are very real advantages to the NHSX original design which simply cannot be replicated with a fully decentralised system. There are two which are particularly noteworthy. First, you can extract aggregated local infection data from the NHSX system which can drive granular local lockdowns. Second, rather more significantly, because of the central control element, you can revoke notifications. That's important because revokeable notifications allows you to take the risk of allowing some notifications based on symptom onset before a test has been conducted. Since the peak transmission window is around symptom onset and the incubation period is short, notifying early has very significant advantages. People will be irritated if they get a notification which is revoked 24 hours later and you do have to consider the behavioural elements but it is a useful capability to have. You can also do exposure cohorting. If person A had 10 contacts in a three hour period and on day 8 after exposure none have developed symptoms, you may consider releasing them all from quarantine early. This requires developing quite a sophisticated risk model and carefully weighing up the tradeoffs - you may decide not to use it - but it is an extremely powerful thing to be able to do. It has never been the case that the Google/Apple solution is "obviously better". Rather there are complex tradeoffs to be considered between different solutions. It would be one thing if we had data to show that the Google/Apple supported solution worked brilliantly. That would mean that the additional features the NHSX design has are not required and therefore the privacy tradeoff is not worth it. We don't though, we know that the a fully centralised panopticon nightmare system works in South Korea and China and we know that we don't want that. (edit: obviously if they can't make their own app because of Bluetooth issues then the whole game ends and they have to switch) (edit 2: it was apparently due to technical issues that they were not able to resolve. In denser areas the keepalive mechanism they built works well and keeps most iphones and androids visible for long periods of time but if you go through a period of not being around other phones, too many will drop out. Note that Bluetooth is an inherently challenging way of mapping distance and that this applies to any app which uses it)
jonnypotty 6y ago
Why does everyone seem to think coronavirus death stats are like a score of how well your government is doing in response to the pandemic. If you didn't manage to stop the virus entering your country, which you can't without destroying international travel and your economy, then the end game is 60-70 percent of your population having had it. As long as people aren't dying in your country due to lack of medical care then you've not done too bad right? We cannot avoid most people contracting this virus so why are people keeping running totals of deaths as a score card? I guess we like the idea that we could have stopped it and it gives us a sense of control and something to rage against. The UK government is estimating that 1/1000 people have had it already. If true that means our final death toll could be in the millions right? we don't talk about that thou, we just say, lockdown should have happened a week earlier! We could have saved 2000 lives. Ok, is that 2000 lives OVERALL, like final figures or is it just 2000 lives by this point? And the idea that it's just the UK government... 1/6 people said they'd ignore the governments advise on face coverings on public transport. Basically the UK is a load of raging, entitled children for the most part, we don't want to sacrifice anything and we want other people to fix things for us... Cos it's "their job"
- formatjam 6y ago
  No. look at China and Korea. It can be well controlled. Business has been reopened with little new cases.
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    China has been going through cycles of partially reopening followed by regional lockdowns when flare-ups happen. They are nowhere near "reopened". South Korea is one of the poster children for "manage to stop the virus entering your country". They have been aggressively responding to each and every case because they are able to identify each case that enters the country. Even then, they are still not fully "reopened". I agree that neither has reached the level of "destroying international travel and your economy", but let's not understate the impact that their measures are having either.
- tompagenet2 6y ago
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
I think they were right to try for an ambitious model that tried to do things that the Google-Apple model didn't. I also think they should have developed two apps in parallel from the beginning. It would hardly have cost much more when you consider the benefits and it would mean that the decision to move from one to the other could be made immediately. (I know they've been working on a Google/Apple one but not sure how much work has gone into it.)

127 points by csmattryder 6y ago

zpeti 6y ago

UK government seems to be behind everyone else on every policy decision on coronavirus. Win for privacy.

Traster 6y ago
That's what you get when you put fairly incompetent people in positions of power because they align with your political views. All the way back to having political advisors sitting on the "Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies" the first question has been about the politics of policy rather than efficacy.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Someone who is currently a cabinet minister did memorably say: "I think the people in this country have had enough of experts"
  - timthorn 6y ago
    The full quote continues: "...from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best, and getting it consistently wrong."
    - faemir 6y ago
      ...while trying to peddle absolute economic lies, which were called out by the independent UK statistical authority as misleading. In the same breath also lying about him not running a candidacy to be PM, declining to name any figures backing his assertions. What are you trying to say?
      - lambdadmitry 6y ago
        That the quote is taken out of context, I guess. Other factors that you've mentioned don't change the fact.
        arethuza 6y ago
        HMG is also an acronym!

jjgreen 6y ago

I can't see Palantir being happy about that.

noir_lord 6y ago
To me that makes it very much a double win. Palantir of all people shouldn't have been anywhere near the NHS in the first place.
peruvian 6y ago
Good. One of the most evil companies out there.

djaychela 6y ago

I wonder how this will go down with Palantir and Faculty - I can't imagine this was in their game plan. I'm in the UK and I've almost given up on watching the news as it seems every step taken by the government is weeks behind where it should be, and taken in a reactive way, rather than there being any kind of proactive, coordinated response to the crisis. This is welcome, but months behind when it should have happened - plenty of discussion on here said the route they were trying to take wouldn't work for technical reasons, aside from one's of privacy. By the time this is up and running, it'll be irrelevant.

noir_lord 6y ago
> I wonder how this will go down with Palantir and Faculty. I wonder if I can have one day delivery on the worlds smallest violin.
rezeroed 6y ago
The whole thing is political (the two party system is a disaster). I don't think Boris wanted lock down or any other curbs on freedom - that's not in his character. I expect he would have preferred the Swedish approach, but he's trying to win over the left, which is fairly futile because they'll always find something to shout at him about.
- toyg 6y ago
  > he's trying to win over the left That's... new. He got in power by courting the hard right. He nominated hardcore right-wingers to all key positions, and pre-covid was busy implementing a hard-right "no prisoners" approach to Brexit. And now he'd supposedly be leaning left...? I agree that he wanted to follow Trump in not locking down anything - but he had to change course after meeting resistance from scientists in the civil service, as widely reported, not from "the left". "The left" didn't even have an actual leader for most of the crisis.
  - rezeroed 6y ago
    The left includes Adam Boulton, Beth Rigby, Piers Morgan, the Guardian, the BBC, the people banging pots and pans on their balconies on Thursday evenings. Getting in to power and retaining power don't require the same strategy. Example, school lunches.

mattlondon 6y ago

This is a win for privacy - the previous model used a centralised "anonymous" database, with the idea being that the data could then be mined for various purposes officially relating to spotting outbreaks and the like. Obviously, this sounds very big-brothery since it would have been a database of who was where with who and when etc. Not sure if this sudden outbreak of common sense was due to either: a) technical difficulties of doing something hacky with iOS to try and make the background bluetooth approach work or implementing the backend, b) something else usurping the need for the data mining (e.g. perhaps the much-trumpeted track-and-trace system where people self-report/voluntarily tell the government who they spend time with) c) actually caring about people's privacy. Probably a combination of a + b I expect. c feels like a longshot.

toyg 6y ago
d) allowing them to leverage existing opensource code from the European efforts, without actually having to admit the dependency e) speeding up development, because of a) and d), which also means making it cheaper and less reliant on a single supplier f) the new guy in charge has some Apple contacts he might be able to leverage to, again, speed up things.
tomatocracy 6y ago
You could also add the potential that the pilot on the Isle of Wight led them to believe that app-based contact tracing is not really very helpful anyway.

zspitzer 6y ago

Is the UK app also geo-blocked to only UK based Apple/google Accounts like the new German app? https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android/issues/478 https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android/issues/47...

robin_reala 6y ago
This is actually a problem. I’m in Sweden, but as it’s really hard to transfer my Apple account from the UK (especially with a family account) I’ve never bothered. So am I going to not have access to Sweden’s contract tracing app if one is built?
- alibarber 6y ago
  I have gotten a visa and worked in other countries with less effort than trying to move app store. I just don't get it. I now live in Finland, with a Finnish address and bank card and everything and I still can't get the damn thing to change. I refuse to accept that it is a technical impossibility to have a UK bank app and a Finnish one (for example) on the same phone.
  - jen20 6y ago
    My experience here is similar and not resolved after several years. My phone now now happily installs US apps (after starting in the UK) _except_ that it will not update the Google Fi app, but my watch with the same account complains every 15 minutes about being in the wrong store with no way to resolve it. I do have apps from both stores installed on my phone now (after a lot of trial and error), but believe there is a special place in hell _anyway_ for companies providing services like delivery who do not add their apps to stores globally (looking at you, Doordash). Do they think a tourist or business traveller never wants to order lunch to their hotel?
    - renaudg 6y ago
      A general rule of software is that any bug that a US-based developer or QA tester wouldn't easily be able to trigger can remain present for a very, very long time.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

The centralised approach is 'better' for the stated aims but it is harder to reliably develop. I suspect that they concluded that the whole system won't be ready soon enough (ideally it should have been deployed by now) and so they are switching to something they can deploy faster. In any case I suspect that these apps will make very little difference because they will come too late, not be used widely enough, and provide too little actionable data.

underdeserver 6y ago

So Germany and the UK, right? Any other countries using this already? Preliminary data?

toyg 6y ago
FTA: "The UK follows Germany, Italy and Denmark among others" Also: " the European Commission said that France - which had adopted a centralised app - would face challenges in this regard." I think we will inevitably see most developed countries falling in line. On the other hand, I expect the likes of Hungary to go "centralized".

JamesBaxter 6y ago

Is this the real reason why the app seemed like it was suddenly going to be delayed? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340

plantain 6y ago

I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country. They're still debating a quarantine for new arrivals, contact tracing is yet to really start, testing lagged significantly... It's an island nation, it should have had a head-and-shoulders advantage over continental Europe with full potential for an outcome closer to New Zealand or Australia rather than the US or Brazil. What went wrong?

toyg 6y ago
> What went wrong? A government was elected to "get Brexit done", despite being patently (and provably) hopeless at everything else. Then "Everything else" suddenly became really important, and here we are.
- rezeroed 6y ago
  No, it's because they don't really want all this fuss; forced hand. They're trying to get away with as little as possible - Sweden, but without looking like the Swedish approach because the left will scream.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    I think they were right about the screaming bit. Here in North America, we're doing alright. Canada got relatively lucky, timing the restrictions before the peak unlike so many other places. The U.S. overall rates of COVID death are dramatically lower than the UK and Sweden, and people still frame it like the President is a bloody-handed murderer who gets off on watching people suffer. Mexico made a big stink about things, and some politicians there even turned their noses up at the U.S. (still the country most likely to render aid) during its peak, but are going into a mass outbreak of their own, that is on a steady trajectory to kill as many or more than the U.S. one.
    - 6y ago

JoeSmithson 6y ago

The government had already basically eaten the bad press on the privacy aspects of their design vs the Google/Apple API... I wonder what prompted this. I know that the app used a kind of hack to allow for Bluetooth during sleep (something missing from the Aus app) - maybe they were told that was going to be patched out? I really think this must be related to it not working as intended rather than anything political.

angrygoat 6y ago
Yes - the Australian app has all sorts of hacky workarounds, at least on iOS, such as notifications once or twice a day which ask you to foreground the app and 'make sure it is running'. Hopefully we will get an update here to use the new APIs.
mrkwse 6y ago
The health minister overseeing it suggested it could be delayed until winter yesterday citing both concerns about public response to the method (which sounds like a bit of a vacant excuse) and unspecified 'technical challenges'.[1] I'd speculate that this is a case of the original technique not being a success on the Isle of Wight tests and a change of approach to lean on the device/OS manufacturers rather than try and work around them. [1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-contract-tracing-app-uk-nhs-a9571461.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-c...
- Theodores 6y ago
  There is a certain stillborn quality to the app. I don't think the Isle of Wight has much to do with it. They got VMWare/Pivotal to write an app people could install on their phones and that was never updated. The NHSX GitHub repo of the code exists but there is little activity. A few updates to URLs in the documents is as far as it goes. A crypto coin project from a few years ago has a similar feel to the code. Nothing is going on. The symptoms were changed over the last few weeks to officially accept that loss of taste/smell was a defining characteristic. The app could have been updated to include this updated self diagnosis information. That would have at least indicated progress. But not even these basic updates have happened. Pull requests are few and far between. The ones that exist are not dealt with. Again, a sign of a project far from active. With software we all know that you can do stuff client or server side to a certain extent. We don't know how much of the server side of this app is built. I suspect they put a minimum effort app together just because. There is no evidence of it hooking up to call centres and contact tracing. The people in the call centres are allegedly idle. The public mood has changed and people are using their common sense rather than following government guidance to the letter. The opportunity for everyone to be running this app has gone. Only a change such as a requirement to have the app if using public transport or entering shops can make it an app people want to use.

mattlondon 6y ago

Interesting comment from the BBC article that I had not thought about before: > "make the app compatible with other countries' counterparts, which are based on the same system " So if multiple countries are using the Apple-Google system, we'll have an international system that anyone can use? I guess this bodes well for future international travel over the next 12/18 months (... or until the vaccines etc are ready) since we'd still get the benefits if we are in compatible countries.

Mindwipe 6y ago
They aren't international by default, but enabling (opt in by the developer) interoperability is on the Google/Apple roadmap. It would be difficult to see how that would ever happen for an app not using the APIs.

amcoastal 6y ago

Or just don't download an app that is entirely useless in practice while being extremely problematic in many ways...

hubbabubbarex 6y ago

Oh who is stypid to take any government shaite in they phones.. Oh my. Google is enough to violate all my privacy.. No more racism from Google or any other they affiliates thanks

NCG_Mike 6y ago

Good. The NHS has a terrible history of software development.

robin_reala 6y ago
Leaving the app to one side, NHS Digital has been doing good stuff for the last couple of years: https://digital.nhs.uk/ https://digital.nhs.uk/
- toyg 6y ago
  Which is why this government is keen to gut it and outsource it all to the likes of Babylon.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  They do, and there were good people working on this. That said, my suspicion is that they have good track records of working with open web stacks, and were somewhat less familiar with the realities of working with closed app platforms that relate to hardware integration, and that's where they came unstuck.
mellosouls 6y ago
The NHS aren't developing it, it's developed by a private company. If you mean that private companies developing for the public sector in shady deals have a terrible history, I'd agree.

jonplackett 6y ago

This is just yet another case of the UK government insisting they know best, continuing down a stupid path despite watching everyone else successfully walking the opposite direction. From locking down late, to stopping contact tracing early, to not mass-testing, to releasing infected people into care homes. Just pure arrogance / incompetence. (I'm British in case you wondered... sigh...)

arethuza 6y ago
Nitpick: Arrogance and incompetence - something we do so well!
- nix23 6y ago
  Forget it...France is still number one, you silly tee-drinker ;)
pmlnr 6y ago
I voluntarily live in the UK as an EU citizen. Most countries have faults, these are the British faults. Germany won't act without a manual to follow, in Hungary you need direct permission from the maffia (also known as the governing party); choose your poison.
- futurix 6y ago
  Well, the difference is that German manual tends to work in the end. Certainly worked for Coronavirus (so far).
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    There were a lot of bad editions of the manual throughout the 20th century.
    - unfunco 6y ago
      Godwin's law at work…

prepend 6y ago

“ And questions remain about whether any smartphone-based system reliant on Bluetooth signals will be accurate enough to be useful” This is the biggest question for me. I’m interested in the actual public health usefulness.

toyg 6y ago

This is a lot of noise about something that, unless it is made compulsory as some Asian countries have done, will likely end up like the Norwegian effort: 2% install rate and hence useless.

_Wintermute 6y ago

These comments have the expected pessimism from anything UK related, but after watching the disaster of France's home-grown centralised app this seems like a smart choice.

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

There is an interesting discussion to be had about contact tracing apps and choice of model, most of the internet and all of the press will not be having it. (Ill informed and barely remembered fragments that somehow Palantir / Cummings / Satan's niece was involved in this app are nonsense. Palantir is doing some internal data vis work and both apps are being built by the same team anyway) The first thing to consider is whether this has led to a real delay in roll-out. We don't know that so far, but we do know that they actually started work on an app based on the Google-Apple API more than a month ago and very few countries have done a full roll-out of an app based on that API yet (and those quite recently). We also know that these approaches work better after "full lockdown" because during the lockdown contacts are already massively suppressed. If it hasn't led to a delay, then the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth will be completely irrelevant. Optionality is good, the more things tried the better. The second is to acknowledge that one of the issues with the (very good idea) of partially or wholly anonymous contact tracing is that apparently people don't like receiving this news from an app interface. That makes an app which interfaces which the rest of the contact tracing system like the one that NHSX originally built a better bet. The third is to realise that there is as yet no evidence that these solutions work at all. We know that fully centralised contact tracing (which includes a geolocation tracking app) works in Asia. Nobody knows if either the fully decentralised DP-3T system developed by Apple/Google or the partially decentralised PEPP-PT/Robert system developed by NHSX will works. The fourth is that if you can make it work around phone OS restrictions, there are very real advantages to the NHSX original design which simply cannot be replicated with a fully decentralised system. There are two which are particularly noteworthy. First, you can extract aggregated local infection data from the NHSX system which can drive granular local lockdowns. Second, rather more significantly, because of the central control element, you can revoke notifications. That's important because revokeable notifications allows you to take the risk of allowing some notifications based on symptom onset before a test has been conducted. Since the peak transmission window is around symptom onset and the incubation period is short, notifying early has very significant advantages. People will be irritated if they get a notification which is revoked 24 hours later and you do have to consider the behavioural elements but it is a useful capability to have. You can also do exposure cohorting. If person A had 10 contacts in a three hour period and on day 8 after exposure none have developed symptoms, you may consider releasing them all from quarantine early. This requires developing quite a sophisticated risk model and carefully weighing up the tradeoffs - you may decide not to use it - but it is an extremely powerful thing to be able to do. It has never been the case that the Google/Apple solution is "obviously better". Rather there are complex tradeoffs to be considered between different solutions. It would be one thing if we had data to show that the Google/Apple supported solution worked brilliantly. That would mean that the additional features the NHSX design has are not required and therefore the privacy tradeoff is not worth it. We don't though, we know that the a fully centralised panopticon nightmare system works in South Korea and China and we know that we don't want that. (edit: obviously if they can't make their own app because of Bluetooth issues then the whole game ends and they have to switch) (edit 2: it was apparently due to technical issues that they were not able to resolve. In denser areas the keepalive mechanism they built works well and keeps most iphones and androids visible for long periods of time but if you go through a period of not being around other phones, too many will drop out. Note that Bluetooth is an inherently challenging way of mapping distance and that this applies to any app which uses it)

jonnypotty 6y ago

Why does everyone seem to think coronavirus death stats are like a score of how well your government is doing in response to the pandemic. If you didn't manage to stop the virus entering your country, which you can't without destroying international travel and your economy, then the end game is 60-70 percent of your population having had it. As long as people aren't dying in your country due to lack of medical care then you've not done too bad right? We cannot avoid most people contracting this virus so why are people keeping running totals of deaths as a score card? I guess we like the idea that we could have stopped it and it gives us a sense of control and something to rage against. The UK government is estimating that 1/1000 people have had it already. If true that means our final death toll could be in the millions right? we don't talk about that thou, we just say, lockdown should have happened a week earlier! We could have saved 2000 lives. Ok, is that 2000 lives OVERALL, like final figures or is it just 2000 lives by this point? And the idea that it's just the UK government... 1/6 people said they'd ignore the governments advise on face coverings on public transport. Basically the UK is a load of raging, entitled children for the most part, we don't want to sacrifice anything and we want other people to fix things for us... Cos it's "their job"

formatjam 6y ago
No. look at China and Korea. It can be well controlled. Business has been reopened with little new cases.
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  China has been going through cycles of partially reopening followed by regional lockdowns when flare-ups happen. They are nowhere near "reopened". South Korea is one of the poster children for "manage to stop the virus entering your country". They have been aggressively responding to each and every case because they are able to identify each case that enters the country. Even then, they are still not fully "reopened". I agree that neither has reached the level of "destroying international travel and your economy", but let's not understate the impact that their measures are having either.
tompagenet2 6y ago

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

I think they were right to try for an ambitious model that tried to do things that the Google-Apple model didn't. I also think they should have developed two apps in parallel from the beginning. It would hardly have cost much more when you consider the benefits and it would mean that the decision to move from one to the other could be made immediately. (I know they've been working on a Google/Apple one but not sure how much work has gone into it.)