- Title: Latvia launches Google-Apple friendly coronavirus contact tracing app
- Date: 29th May 2020
- Summary: SCREEN PRESENTING APP VARIOUS OF SCREENS SHOWING APTURI COVID APP FUNCTIONALITY
- Embargoed: 12th June 2020 13:45
- Keywords: COVID-19 Latvian app contact tracing coronaviru social distancing
- Location: RIGA, LATVIA
- City: RIGA, LATVIA
- Country: Latvia
- Topics: Health/Medicine
- Reuters ID: LVA002CFZIGQH
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Latvia became one of the first countries to launch a smartphone app using a new toolkit created by U.S. tech giants Apple and Alphabet's Google to help trace coronavirus infections.
The early success of tracing apps in countries like Singapore and Australia has been patchy because Apple's iPhone does not support their approach to using Bluetooth short-range radio as a proxy for measuring the risk of infection.
Latvia's Apturi COVID (Stop COVID) app, officially launched on Friday (May 29) during an online event, is, by contrast, based on technology launched last week by Apple and Google, whose iOS and Android operating systems run 99% of the world's smartphones.
The app would only work within the Baltic nation of nearly 2 million people at first.
But its approach aligns Latvia with a loose coalition of European countries - including Germany, Switzerland and Estonia - that are working to make it possible for their national apps to 'talk' to each other across borders.
Like mobile roaming, such interoperability would enable an app to work when a user travels abroad, giving governments greater confidence to ease travel restrictions without triggering a second wave of the pandemic.
(Production: Janis Laizans, Malgorzata Wojtunik) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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