What’s the most important app on your phone?

by Nele Stahlmann

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Every morning I check my corona app to see if I’ve unwittingly been exposed to someone with Covid-19. Relying on the app is an imperfect system –participation is voluntary, those who test positive must enter that information themselves, and for a long time, the app was not working properly on many phones.
But my national corona app is the first line of defence and helps users break the chain of infection. As winter descends on the Northern Hemisphere, infection rates are skyrocketing.

In Germany, the lockdown was just extended. The same happened in Austria and Greece.

So how should countries roll out corona apps?

Singapore launched the first national coronavirus-tracing app but uptake was low — about 40% of the population. As a reaction, the city-state is requiring its residents to have the app by year-end to leave their houses.

Their move from voluntary to mandatory brings up important ethical questions. Can we mandate an app if it only traces encounters? What if it tracks our every movement? We discussed the ethical questions behind this two weeks ago.

If we choose a voluntary approach, how do we actually get people to download and use it?

The German corona app prioritized data security (and built trust), but engagement still isn’t nearly as high as it should be. Can we take what we know from Silicon Valley’s rollout of apps and apply it here? Could we copy Facebook and Uber– targeting specific segments of the population who would see an immediate benefit from using it — instead of Google+ with indiscriminately opening it to all?

These are the questions we need to ask if we want these apps to actually work — and to be successful they need high user engagement. That’s why I’m encouraging you to participate with your company and personal social media channels in a day of action on December 10th to push for better awareness of corona apps.

This article was first published in the weekly FightBack Newsletter. Subscribe here for regular inspiration on impactful corporate innovation.