COVID-19 Radar App Failures: Google Investigates

Coronavirus and COVID-19 are still on the agenda, unfortunately. In many countries around the world, including Europe, people have different apps to track the virus and now Google is confirming that it is working to resolve an issue that affects notifications from these apps.

In Europe, this app is called COVID Radar, and on Android and iOS, Apple and Google have collaborated to develop the tracking API that allows these apps to work and notify users that they are exposed to others affected by the virus. Now, as confirmed by The Verge, there is an error that affects this system on Android and would prevent tracking apps from working properly.

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Official Google sources have confirmed to The Verge that this problem exists and have not yet been able to identify it, but they are working on it.

Google engineers are investigating the bug that is believed to affect all apps around the world that use the Android exposure notification system.

For now, failures have been confirmed between users of the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales, and the CoronaMelder app, the equivalent of our COVID radar in the Netherlands. Apps display “loading” notifications, but look no further. The app fails when it tries to load in the background and therefore does not perform the function for which it was developed.

“We are aware of an issue affecting Android applications developed with the Android exposure notification system. Our engineers are studying the problem.

At the moment, no report affects the one used in Europe, COVID Radar, but Google reports that these errors could be extended to all applications. They continue to work on fixing the bugs as soon as possible.