Yesterday afternoon Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed some rare good news: the new Covid-19 track and trace app, which launched last week, has already been downloaded over ten million times. Clearly, the British people are eager to use the promise of contact tracing technology to limit the spread of the virus.
The app’s arrival is months late after it was revealed the government’s original ‘centralised’ approach was fatally flawed. But now the new, improved version is here, the same question hangs over it: will it actually work? So far, the answer isn’t clear.
In the days since launch, two potentially significant drawbacks have been identified by users.
The first is technical. Users of older phones discovered that though they can install the app and use it to manually ‘check in’ to venues by scanning a QR code, they cannot use the main contact tracing functionality, which uses bluetooth to identify who has been in close proximity to who.
Britain’s best politics newsletters
You get two free articles each week when you sign up to The Spectator’s emails.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate, free for a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first month free.
UNLOCK ACCESS Try a month freeAlready a subscriber? Log in