StopCovid, the contact tracking application that France is seeking to develop against the coronavirus, "will work very well" on the iPhone and Apple smartphones, Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O said on Thursday.
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"The good news is that we have the technical means to circumvent the limitation of the iPhone and that the application will work very well" on these devices, said Cédric O before Jurem, an association of lawyers close to LREM. "This is what the tests conducted by the English have shown", which develop a similar application in principle, "apart from a few small subjects".
Several competing solutions
It would seem, for example, that the application does not work well for the time being on older versions of Android and IOS, the smartphone operating systems developed by Apple and Google, said Cédric O.
The government wants to launch a smartphone application that automatically warns other recently encountered users when they discover they are contaminated. But Google and Apple are developing their own solution for contact tracing, which will be customizable by the states that choose it.
Parliament's opinion "on 26 or 27 May"
The apple brand, which jealously protects the security of its devices, refuses to let French developers access certain features of smartphones, complicating their task. "But this subject, which was a subject of concern, is no longer one," said Cédric O, who recalled that laboratory and field tests were being started for StopCovid.
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The secretary of state said that the parliament would be asked to give an opinion on the application "on 26 and 27 May", without giving details. The government's objective is that the application can start operating on June 2.
For people who don't have a smartphone, the project managers are thinking about a connected object that could also work with StopCovid. "For the moment, it's complicated (...) If we have something, we won't have it until the summer," said Cédric O.