Future of the Corona warning app: An app dispute?

For virologists, the end of the corona pandemic is in sight. The future of the Corona-Warn-App is still uncertain. Federal Minister of Health Lauterbach does not want to say goodbye to her so quickly.

At the start in June 2020, the then head of the Chancellery, Helge Braun, was certain: “This isn’t the first Corona app in the world, but I’m convinced it’s the best.” It is at least one of the most successful apps in recent years – hardly any have been downloaded more often. It has now been installed more than 48 million times.

And Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach does not want to say goodbye to her so quickly: “Imagine if we no longer used the Corona warning app and there would be new waves. It cannot be ruled out that the corona pandemic will still comes back and that there are new variants. Then we have to be prepared.”

Less and less red alerts

Lauterbach remains cautious and the warning app on many smartphones. According to the Bitkom digital association, it is still used by 37 percent of people in Germany.

Red warning messages now appear much less frequently on smartphone displays. Several thousand people are currently reporting their positive test result per day. At the peak of the omicron wave in March 2022, there were more than a hundred thousand reports a day.

For Anke Domscheit-Berg, digital policy spokeswoman for the left, the app has long been an important building block in the fight against the pandemic. “But at some point the raison d’être for such an app is no longer there. I constantly have risky contacts. But I no longer get red tiles because, for example, only PCR tests flow in and you hardly get PCR tests anymore.”

Contracts run until May

For virologists, the end of the pandemic is in sight. In some federal states, people infected with corona no longer have to go into isolation. So what use is an app now that is supposed to warn about risky encounters? The other functions such as corona vaccination card, pandemic data and the diary function are no longer particularly in demand.

The app, developed by the software company SAP and Deutsche Telekom, will cost around 220 million euros in total. The main contracts will run until the end of May.

Will the app become a digital vaccination card?

Health Minister Lauterbach has now announced “that we are developing the Corona warning app further into a general app that also provides more than the Corona functionalities.” The minister did not want to reveal what such a general app should be able to do, when and how it will be developed.

Some ideas can be heard again and again: For example, that the app could become a digital vaccination card. Domscheit-Berg doesn’t think much of it: “It’s an abuse of trust. One of the reasons why we have 40 million installations of this app is that it had a very clear purpose, because it was promised from the start: It only has this one purpose and no other. That I don’t think it’s serious if you suddenly think up completely different things for this app to do.”

Reactivation desired within 24 hours

Instead, Domscheit-Berg could imagine that the app would first disappear from cell phones and from public awareness, but would continue to be maintained in the background, including all necessary security updates. “So that if something new, bad comes up again, you could reactivate it within 24 hours. Then it might not be called the Corona warning app, but after some other pandemic, but then you have that there.”

That could at least help if the disease is transmitted in a similar way to the corona virus, and if it also depends on how long and how close an encounter with an infected person was.