UK coronavirus tracking app - discussion

[existentialist]

Yeah, I don't think many government tracking apps are going to prove successful.

I think whats particularly galling with the UK situation is that the government insisted on having a UK specific one for reasons they wouldn't tell anyone and than continued with it even when they were being told it would never be able to work on Apple. This is on top of them conflating the app with a general track and trace system. You see it on this thread which is supposed to about the app but a lot of the discussion is about track and trace. This is not surprising given the government message for a long time.

Thing is, if the bloody thing had actually WORKED, it could have been part of an effective general track and trace system. But what seems to be happening, not untypically, is the government's response to the series of app clusterfucks has been "But our worldbeating test-and-trace system!". Which isn't exactly wonderful, anyway. It's like they have a limitless supply of dead cats to excitedly point out...

 

[elbows]

Well Scotland has launched their 'Protect Scotland' app, so WTF are they UK government up too?

Our app is currently being trialled on the moon, where there is less chance of it telling a huge proportion of a hospitals staff to self isolate automatically, a risk compared to the manual system where officials can 'manage' the situation by fiddling with the idea of what counts as close contact.

Meanwhile we are supposed to forget that we were told this app would be key to getting through winter, reopening things etc.

 

[weepiper]

Me, partner, my dad, most of my work colleagues have already downloaded the app. Hopefully there will be a good uptake of it.

 

[existentialist]

Me, partner, my dad, most of my work colleagues have already downloaded the app. Hopefully there will be a good uptake of it.

Uptake is one thing, but first it has to work.

 

[cupid_stunt]

BREAKING NEWS - NHS app for England & Wales is launching on 24th Sept.

 

[William of Walworth]

BREAKING NEWS - NHS app for England & Wales is launching on 24th Sept.

Brief and early BBC story here

 

[Badgers]

Health Secretary Matt Hancock described the launch as "a defining moment".

The 'literal' kiss of death

 

[existentialist]

BREAKING NEWS - NHS app for England & Wales is launching on 24th Sept.

And crashing and burning on 25th...?

 

[Cloo]

BREAKING NEWS - NHS app for England & Wales is launching on 24th Sept.

is all I can say to that. It does feel a bit like they've suddenly remembered they were supposed to launch an app so now they've announced it and they're hoping someone can make it work in time.

Will have to ask brother in law if this is based on the same app launched in the borough where he's heading public health (which looked pretty good actually)

 

[existentialist]

So....they're going for a QR code option (presumably in addition to the more dubious contact-via-Bluetooth facility). That makes a lot more sense - much more low-tech, but far less reliant on technology that hasn't been proven as effective. OK, so it relies on people doing the QR code thing, but I guess that's more achievable.

 

[mauvais]

That element of an app - proactive, user-driven registration and check-in - makes perfect sense, especially since places like restaurants can (and do) effectively make it part of their process.

If you reduce down an automatic tracing app to a spec of '15 minutes contact', and forget about proximity and whatever, that might also work to a degree. But uptake remains a big problem.

I think my view on this overall subject has shifted slightly not really by anything happening in tech development but, because the real world is such a shitshow, we have gone from thinking about what good looks like to thinking about what 'slightly less bad than now, please, anything' looks like.

 

[Dogsauce]

If restaurants/bars/businesses etc. make it conditional for people to have the app in order to enter then that might make uptake pretty high, or people will just go to other restaurants that don’t do this - in which case it might have to be made mandatory by the government - which might upset those with genuine concerns about privacy and enrage mouth-breathing conspiracy loons.

 

[weepiper]

15% of the Scottish population has now downloaded the app, which seems pretty good for two days.

 

[Cloo]

I'm not especially worried that this is going to be some tool of government control above & beyond what it's supposed to. I'm more worried about it potentially introducing security holes to my phone. Will probably still download anyway.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

My position on the new version remains exactly the same as my position on the old one, except that this time I can't just say "don't even need to think about downloading it because it can't possibly work" as apparently this one can. So it's down to data policy and utility in practice - and actually those are aspects of the same thing. Pretty much no app exists just as "an app", it's about what data they collect and what that's used for.

 

[frogwoman]

Not particularly worried tbh, we use Facebook ,Google and yes urban75 every day.

 

[weepiper]

And it does appear to work:

 

[scifisam]

So....they're going for a QR code option (presumably in addition to the more dubious contact-via-Bluetooth facility). That makes a lot more sense - much more low-tech, but far less reliant on technology that hasn't been proven as effective. OK, so it relies on people doing the QR code thing, but I guess that's more achievable.

A restaurant I went in had a QR code thing and it didn't work on either of our phones so one of us had to fill in a paper form using a shared pen. They don't tend to work well at IME.

 

[existentialist]

A restaurant I went in had a QR code thing and it didn't work on either of our phones so one of us had to fill in a paper form using a shared pen. They don't tend to work well at IME.

Oh, ok, that's not so brilliant. I wonder what it was that wasn't working...

 

[LDC]

Oh, ok, that's not so brilliant. I wonder what it was that wasn't working...

Badly printed by the restaurant? Think they need to be clear to work reliably.

 

[platinumsage]

A restaurant I went in had a QR code thing and it didn't work on either of our phones so one of us had to fill in a paper form using a shared pen. They don't tend to work well at IME.

They work fine and are ubiquitous in China for making purchases at e.g. market stalls, not to mention all the corona stuff they use them for.

 

[existentialist]

Badly printed by the restaurant? Think they need to be clear to work reliably.

That was what I wondered. I had a little go at printing out QR codes a while back...and I know a thing or two about resolutions and resizing, and it took me a while to figure out that you don't have to mess about with those too much to make the code unusable. Admittedly, that was also to do with the selection of the type of QR code, etc (different types have different data densities). I wonder how these restaurants get the QR code that they're meant to put up on the wall...because if it's one of HMG's, ahahaha, "preferred suppliers", we can pretty much guarantee that they've bollocksed it up, probably by trying to incorporate a kilobyte of marketing bullshit into the code, or something

 

[Clair De Lune]

The QR code or texting a number thing didn't work when I went to a pub or restaurant recently. My phone seemingly won't text certain numbers even though its a contract phone it says I have no credit when I try.

 

[existentialist]

The QR code or texting a number thing didn't work when I went to a pub or restaurant recently. My phone seemingly won't text certain numbers even though its a contract phone it says I have no credit when I try.

That shouldn't be a problem with the app, which will be doing its own thing with the QR code. But yes - some phones and accounts may well refuse to do things with certain QR codes, like the ones which are using (for example) premium text numbers.

 

[scifisam]

They work fine and are ubiquitous in China for making purchases at e.g. market stalls, not to mention all the corona stuff they use them for.

I'm sure that's true about China, but it's also true that when I've tried to use them, they haven't worked.

 

[xenon]

A pub I go to had / has the QR code thing. Also all orders are conducted via an app, only one person can use the toilet at a time, the cubical in the gents / ladies. Partitions between tables and some tables moved outside on to the street. All fairly sensible as it's a pretty small pub.

The down side is the clientel who don't really use apps or perhaps even have a smart phone, only pay with cash, haven't really been going back.

I've got used to the app now but have only used the QR code thing once TBH as don't know where it is and haven't bene directed to it.

Do you have to have Bluetooth turned on all the time or can you log your presence with the QR code thing without it enabled?

 

[2hats]

That was what I wondered. I had a little go at printing out QR codes a while back...

I use them to simplify the exchange of security tokens in particular workflows. You have to ensure resolution and padding (the quiet zone) are sufficient and obviously for reading there is only a certain degree of tolerance of distortion and noise but they can be surprisingly robust in some circumstances.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Yeah, I mean the actual technology of QR codes is sound but all it does is make a short piece of data easily machine-readable. There's no guarantee that the machine reading it is going to deal with the data as intended - let alone the website that you are often then sent to even if it does (normally what happens in a phone context; there are common protocols for what QR codes mean to phones).

 

[FridgeMagnet]

A bar near me has a good implementation of QR codes - every table has one, and when you scan it you're taken to a web page which has the menu on it. Choose what you want, pay for it (this step would be a slight pain if you don't have Apple or Google Pay, but there are other options, you can enter a card and some other payment providers are supported) and the order is automatically sent to the bar, who bring it out to the correct place. Very quick and easy, and no downloading/registering on terrible apps like the Youngs one, which not only took me about ten minutes just to get working, but then just stopped working after a while.

ETA: it's called TableSnappr.

TableSnappr - Self-ordering tech for hospitality venues. — TableSnappr

TableSnappr is the fastest and most flexible customer self-ordering tool for high-volume venues - from food halls & festivals to hotels & amusement parks.

www.tablesnappr.com