It boggles my mind that I have to remind many app publishers that we live in a globalized world and that it’s a natter of a few minutes work to just select the countries to make the app available in. More so for free apps where the publisher doesn’t have to worry about taxes and payments.
Even for apps that are not localized to English or other languages, the publishers should prefer to get them out to as many people as possible in the whole wide world who may be visiting or on a long stay in a specific country.
In this case, the app developer can surely include help text that explains where the app is meant to be used or would be useful (it’s also not like people with a German App Store account living in some other country would be able to use this app effectively).
This boggles my mind. Sure, it will take a reasonable effort to get widespread use of these apps. But the impact would be huge. Even low rates of app use have a real chance of lowering the reproduction rate significantly, and reasonably broad usage bring it less than 1.0.
The technology is designed in the right way, where anonymous data is being collected with no app required. People can download the app right after they get a positive test and report themselves positive retroactively. Same on the other side, you can download the app and know how much contact you've had with positive cases retroactively.
I'm no longer surprised the US federal government is doing nothing to push this. But I expected more out of the states.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2020/07/13/covid-19-exposure-notificatio...
