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>> Yesterday, the UK announced it was abandoning its own COVID contract tracing app and moving to the Apple model because they couldn't figure out how to make i
by kjakm 6y ago
>> Yesterday, the UK announced it was abandoning its own COVID contract tracing app and moving to the Apple model because they couldn't figure out how to make iPhones wake up via bluetooth (because that's a private API only available to Apple). A major western government is facing huge public embarrassment in a public health crisis over what comes down to not having permission from Apple to use a specific API in an app.
I would not take the government at its word here. Their entire contact tracing program has been a shambles. They contracted the work out to their friends, put the ex-CEO of one of the countries worst ISP's in charge and wasted months trying to hack together their own soution that was never going to work in the first place. If it was really an Apple issue they could go ahead and release their Android app.
- saagarjha 6y agoMaking an iPhone do work in the background is fairly non-trivial, and not launching for that platform is suicide for a contract tracing app.
- Veen 6y agoThey contracted the development of the app to Pivotal, which is owned by VMWare — that's hardly outsourcing to a mate who happens to be a developer.
- lozenge 6y agoBoth sides need to use the app in contact tracing, therefore an Android only app is near useless. Anyway, it's open source and you can see third party enthusiast test results on GitHub. Also, Australia and Germany followed a similar path which you can see in the tech news.
- koheripbal 6y agoThey are correct though - that API is indeed private.