UK scraps its own coronavirus-tracing app to join Apple and Google
- The original UK model had been criticised by privacy advocates for giving the government too much control over people’s data
- Tests showed the NHSX app identified 75 per cent of contacts of Android phone users, and just 4 per cent for Apple phone users
The UK abandoned efforts to create its own Covid-19 track-and-trace mobile app and will use Apple and Google technology instead, in a fresh setback for Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
After extensive testing of the domestic app developed by the state National Health Service’s digital arm NHSX and also of the app developed jointly by Apple and Alphabet’s Google, British authorities concluded both have flaws.
“We have agreed to join forces with Google and Apple to bring the best bits of both systems together,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Thursday in a televised press conference. “I will not recommend people to download the app until I am confident that it’s the right thing to do.”
The delay in launching the app is the latest setback for Johnson, whose administration has been criticised for being slow to go into lockdown, not having enough ventilators or protective equipment and a failure to properly protect care homes.
“This is unsurprising and yet another example of where the government’s response has been slow and badly managed,” the opposition Labour Party’s health spokesman, Jonathan Ashworth, said in a statement. “It’s meant precious time and money wasted.”
The premier last month promised a “world-beating” test, track and trace system, and the government for weeks said the app would be an integral part of that. Hancock himself once pledged the technology would be ready for national roll-out by mid-May.