Corona Warn App (Germany)

The case of Germany’s Corona Warn App is one of the more interesting ones, as back in April the country was originally going to back a centralised EU standard called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracking (PEPP-PT), but when Apple refused to budge on loosening iPhone restrictions to accommodate it, the more pragmatic German government realized it needed to change course, rather than digging in its heels like France did.

Germany did so very quickly, as even Chancellor Angela Merkel recognized that Germany citizens would have a “much higher level of acceptance” for the decentralized approach being put forth by Apple and Google.

The result is that the Corona Warn App will be one of the first major contact tracing apps to take advantage of the Exposure Notification APIs, since Germany didn’t waste any time deploying an app that wasn’t going to provide the results it wanted. As German developers explain on the projects Github page, its being released an open-source software so that other countries can benefit from the work that Germany has already done, and will basically follow the Apple approach, which means relying on the data that’s being collected by Apple and Google’s API, and using it solely to notify other users of potential exposure to a person confirmed to have COVID-19 so that they can also be tested themselves.