German corona app has been downloaded six million times in two days
The official open source corona app, released by the German federal government, has been available since Monday evening in Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store and has since been downloaded more than six million times.
The company SAP, which developed the app in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom and other unnamed partners, reports that the 20 million-cost app has now been downloaded more than six million times. The split between the Android and iOS version has not been disclosed. The number of six million downloads is just over 7 percent of the total population of Germany, namely 83 million.
The so-called Corona-Warn-App, which can only be downloaded by German users, was released on Monday evening and, according to the makers, was developed in just fifty days. The costs for the entire development amounted to 20 million euros. According to SAP, this resulted in an app whose development was very transparent, in the sense that the source code was constantly on GitHub during development. This would have included insights from more than 109,000 individual visitors to the code, with contributions from an additional 7,250 community participants and project members.
SAP emphasizes that the app is also very suitable for Germany for other reasons: the decentralized nature, the voluntary nature and the fact that identifying users would not be an issue. For example, no personal data is requested and no location is recorded. The app should have been released in April, but that was not achieved because initially there would be no question of a decentralized character, which was criticized at the time.
The Corona-Warn-App uses the api of Google and Apple. Users indicate in the app whether they have symptoms of the coronavirus. If a smartphone is in close proximity to someone who has reported symptoms for an extended period of time, the user will receive a warning. Data from the app is not stored centrally, but remains on the user’s device. Based on the DP-3T protocol, a new temporary key is created every 24 hours. On this basis, sixteen identifiers are created every two and a half to five minutes, which are broadcast via Bluetooth low energy.