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.
One concern I do have with this approach is that the decentralised system inherently can only model the "risk-to" an individual from an epidemiological perspective. It can't model the "risk-from" side of things. To avoid Sybil type attacks, you need to use centrally issued (and thus verifiable) test results to notify others.
Unless tests are administered very promptly, with results immediately available, it seems difficult to make this work in the decentralised approach - with a mean and median "time to symptoms" of around 5.1 days [1], and someone at their most infectious for the 1 to 2 days prior to experiencing symptoms, it seems decentralised apps will struggle.
If A is infected on day 0, then on day 3 they may infect B and C. On day 5, A experiences symptoms, goes online, and requests a test, saying they have symptoms. They realistically would get a test the following day. and the result the day after that. That would be day 7, and at that point, B and C might be notified by the app. The issue is that B and C are now on day 4 of their own infections, the second day of their most infectious period, walking around unaware. They find out the day before they would themselves (on average) experience symptoms.
Clearly the virus is not as deterministic in behaviour as in this simple model, but the above seems to suggest to me that to get any real value out of this (i.e. preventing the next generation of infection), you need to either be able to respond to symptoms reports, or significantly expedite the testing process. In the above situation, a same-day test-and-result would enable B and C to be notified on day 2 or early on day 3 of their own infection, potentially having some real impact. But to achieve this, the latency of testing would need to drop hugely.
[1] https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/03/09/coronavirus-incubation-period...
It wasn't that clever, it didn't work: https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA/issues/2
I don't think the government deserves the credit they have received for this. The "hack" was well understood and documented before this App was created, and it has been implemented poorly [1]. [1] https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android-BETA/issues/10
Irish researchers precluded this approach from being effective though -- Bluetooth as a technology is just not reliable enough for this specific use case. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/covid-19-...
To my mind, this is a simple matter of reducing the time the "next generation" of infected people are in the community before being notified. If that can be below 3 days, I think the disease can be managed based on the law of averages. If not, it seems it will continue to spread.
That's why, absent a national "Amazon Prime Now" style <= 2 hour delivery window for tests (and some way to verify the results of these tests for input to a decentralised app), I don't see this working.
The app will only really be needed/helpful in cases where you don't know people you are in close or prolonged proximity to, i.e. shops and public transport. In these cases, it makes sense to notify as early as possible, even at the risk of some false positives for those not actually infected, but who were close. The question is how many FPs there will be, but this also happens with human-based contact tracing too.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/uk-coronavirus...
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-c...
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.