Corona warning app is in the starting blocks
Lisa Vogel studied departmental journalism with a focus on medicine and biosciences at Ansbach University and deepened her journalistic knowledge in the master's degree in multimedia information and communication. This was followed by a traineeship in the editorial team. Since September 2020 she has been writing as a freelance journalist for
More posts by Lisa Vogel All content is checked by medical journalists.When it comes to large government software projects, Germany cannot necessarily look back on a great success story. The eagerly anticipated Corona warning app is apparently going better. Even the costs don't get out of hand.
The development of the federal corona warning app by the software company SAP and Deutsche Telekom will cost around 20 million euros. In addition, there are operating costs of 2.5 to 3.5 million euros per month, it was said on Thursday in government circles in Berlin.
The majority of this is due to the operation of two hotlines at Deutsche Telekom. The app should be activated in the coming week after around six weeks of development and help to identify, track and break corona infection chains more quickly.
Multilingual service telephone
The costs for the software development of the Corona-Warn-App of the Robert Koch Institute are at the lower end of the range forecast by the federal government in the amount of "tens of millions". When it comes to the costs for the call center, it must be taken into account that the users should not end up in long queues. In addition, they want to make the service available not only in German, but also in English and Turkish.
App registers positive test results
Users can get help from the hotlines with the installation of the app and the entry of a positive test result. The infected receive an activation code from the call center. The purpose of the procedure is to prevent people who are not infected from inadvertently calling themselves tested positive. Alternatively, those affected can also receive the activation code digitally directly from the test laboratory as a QR code if the laboratory is already equipped accordingly.
If a user tests positive and this status is recorded in the app, other users should be informed that they have been in the vicinity of an infected person. Government circles also said that the app was only one component in the fight against the pandemic and not a panacea. The use is completely voluntary, the program code as "open source" is completely transparent.
Does the app work across national borders?
After the app has been published, the application will be optimized and updated again and again in the coming weeks. In particular, the way it works across national borders should play a major role. Neighboring countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria, like Germany, rely on the concept of decentralized storage of anonymized contact data on the smartphones themselves, as prescribed by Google and Apple. Only the list of anonymized IDs of the infected is stored on a central server for retrieval by the smartphones .
France, on the other hand, opted for centralized storage of contact data and differentiated it from the technical concept of Google and Apple. It will be difficult to establish cross-border compatibility here, it said.
Last tests are in progress
The publication of the app is planned for the coming week, Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) recently confirmed. Tests are still being carried out by SAP and Deutsche Telekom, in which the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is involved, before the app is launched. This is primarily about data security, for example the question of whether hackers can access data or can paralyze the backend system with attacks. (lv / dpa)
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