Coronavirus: Hands on with NHS Covid-19 contact-tracing app
For an app with so much riding on it, NHS Covid-19 is at first sight very simple and extraordinarily unexciting.
At this stage it is only available to NHS and council workers on the Isle of Wight.
On Thursday, other residents of the island will get a leaflet containing a link that will trigger a download.
And eventually anyone will be able to download it directly from the UK versions of Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store.
I have been given special early access.
When you install it, you are asked to enter the first four characters of your postcode. Then you are asked to set up app permissions.
First you have to allow the app to use Bluetooth Low Energy to determine when it is near another phone using the app, keeping Bluetooth on at all times. Next you approve push notifications, so that the app can alert you if you have been near someone with symptoms of the virus.
Finally, you end up on a very simple home screen. It offers the current advice on stopping the spread of the virus and asks a question: "How are you feeling today?"
There is a menu option: "I feel unwell - I have a high temperature or continuous cough and want to know what to do next."
If you choose this, you are asked whether you have a high temperature or a continuous cough. If you answer yes to either question, you are asked when the symptoms started.
At the moment, if you are not on the Isle of Wight, you can submit this information but nothing more happens.
But if you are on the island, you are told to self-isolate and to call an 0800 number to have a swab test delivered to your home.
It also triggers alerts to those people with the app whose phones have been in contact with yours in recent days.
At first these will be fairly cautious messages about observing social distancing. But if a test comes back positive contacts will be told to self-isolate.
Most of the time, however, there will be hardly any reason to interact with the app at all.
Some technical experts have said the NHS app will not work properly on an iPhone unless it is kept open and running in the foreground.
The team behind it insist that is not the case - although that is impossible for me to verify.
2020-05-05 20:28:12
