TousAntiCovid, the official French application, was released back when we had to rely only on contact tracing to slow the spread of coronavirus. It asks for a lot of permissions, beginning with bluetooth (and geolocation), but also to be put in the exceptions of the battery optimization, to be running in the background... Even if it's open source and available on f-droid it requires way too much just to store QR codes.
Having worked with Angular recently for work, I created this little PWA to scan my DCC and show it whenever asked, now that it's required for a lot of activities here. Free of customer requirements, I tried to respect my own ideas: self-hosting capability, no server-side part necessary, no tracking from third-parties scripts.
Funny thing is that it's most probably the first side project I consider completely finished and I'm happy with its current state.
Source code is MIT-licensed, and available here: https://github.com/bchanudet/covid-certificate-pwa
I had limited time and access to iOS devices for testing, any feedback on those devices is appreciated.
But I think this app solves a few additional use cases:
- Some places forbids to display a photo of your QR Code. So you'd have to scan your QR Code on paper, paste the data to a QR Code generator, store the bitmap on your phone. If you're not tech savvy that may be too complex, and you may risk leaking your private data if the QR Code generator doesn't do it locally.
- The app allow storing several certificates, that means you can have your certificate, your teenage children's, and your partner's on your own phone, acting as backups for each other. You can also store the certificate of your elders so they don't need their A4 sheet when you bring them to the supermarket.
- There is a lot of FUD around what's really inside the QR Code. I'm hopeful an application like this, not made by an official entity, will help people understand exactly what kind of data you can read from it.
And also, and finally the biggest reason for this app (and for all of my other projects) to exist: I was curious and I wanted to gain experience on development, here Angular and PWA. :)
