Corona Contact Tracing Germany
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Corona Contact Tracing Germany
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#2The package description doesn't do a particularly great job at explaining what this is:
This is the German "Coroana Warn App"[1], the official German contact tracing app but instead of using Google's Exposure Notification Framework (ENF) it relies on the microG implementation of the same API. It can either use a system-level microG implementation or fall back to the bundled implementation running purely as an app without any system permissions.
This makes the app fully free and 100% compatible with the upstream google based version.
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#3All government apps should be open source, period.
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#4All government apps should be open source, period.
In this case, the app itself is in fact open source. The problem is that it relies on a non-free Google/Apple service for detecting contacts. However, I agree: Even such a dependency should strictly be avoided by government apps. This includes not limiting an app to the Play Store and also using alternative channels such as F-Droid.
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#5All government apps should be open source, period.
In this case, the app itself is in fact open source. The problem is that it relies on a non-free Google/Apple service for detecting contacts. However, I agree: Even such a dependency should strictly be avoided by government apps. This includes not limiting an app to the Play Store and also using alternative channels such as F-Droid.
The other problem is that it's only available on the German app stores, so if your account is in another country, you can't download the app.
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#6If I understand this correctly, this removes one layer of Google code, but keeps building on the Google layers beneath it.
If so, what is the gain here? Can the Exposure Notification Framework be trusted less than the rest of Android? Or does this support more hardware?
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#7If I understand this correctly, this removes one layer of Google code, but keeps building on the Google layers beneath it. If so, what is the gain here? Can the Exposure Notification Framework be trusted less than the rest of Android? Or does this support more hardware?
You can use it on a device without GApps, so without closed-source google code, using only the open source Android codebase (and the blobs and drivers from the manufacturer, depending on your device). This means you don't have to trust Google.
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#8If I understand this correctly, this removes one layer of Google code, but keeps building on the Google layers beneath it. If so, what is the gain here? Can the Exposure Notification Framework be trusted less than the rest of Android? Or does this support more hardware?
You can use it on a device without GApps, so without closed-source google code, using only the open source Android codebase (and the blobs and drivers from the manufacturer, depending on your device). This means you don't have to trust Google.
It uses code from microg for this, which is a free GApps replacement, but needs to be installed at a system level, while this can work on any device
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#9If I understand this correctly, this removes one layer of Google code, but keeps building on the Google layers beneath it. If so, what is the gain here? Can the Exposure Notification Framework be trusted less than the rest of Android? Or does this support more hardware?
> removes one layer of Google code, but keeps building on the Google layers beneath it.
Well, the layers beneath it are AOSP and free software. The situation is certainly not great, with source drops, nonfree firmware blobs, etc. But it is relatively easy to grab an AOSP source-tree for your device, make some changes, rebuild the OS and install this to your phone, given an unlocked/unlockable bootloader. In my opinion this is a highly desirable property of any system I'm using. It also enables things like GrapheneOS and CalyxOS which are Android distributions which focus explicitly on security and privacy.
> Can the Exposure Notification Framework be trusted less than the rest of Android?
ENF is part of Google Play Services and thus proprietary software. It is also a hugely scary and absolutely giant bundle of software you need to keep running in it's entirety, you cannot use just the ENF part. Play services can remotely update any software on your phone, they have also been known to "accidentally" not respect users (location)-tracking opt-out choices. So while I personally don't consider googles ENF implementation problematic (from their docs, the sources are ofc not available) the rest of play services most certainly is.
> Or does this support more hardware?
Apart from the already mentioned gapps free ROMS it supports modern Huawei phones (which also come without gapps). Making it work on Android 5 will probably happen (Google ENF supports Android 6+ afaik)
Re: Corona Contact Tracing Germany
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, the app itself is in fact open source. The problem is that it relies on a non-free Google/Apple service for detecting contacts. However, I agree: Even such a dependency should strictly be avoided by government apps. This includes not limiting an app to the Play Store and also using alternative channels such as F-Droid.
The other problem is that it's only available on the German app stores, so if your account is in another country, you can't download the app.
I am aware that it is possible to download this app from other EU countries then Germany.