The StopCovid application already downloaded more than 600,000 times

The rocket ended up taking off a few hours late. The government application StopCovid, which aims to break the chains of contamination, has had a positive start on the download front.

Available since Tuesday on application platforms for iOS (Apple) and Android (Google), StopCovid has passed the milestone of 600,000 downloads in less than 24 hours, according to official figures.

Within hours, 600,000 people activated #StopCovid. This is a very good start. The work of epidemiologists shows that, from the first downloads, the application is useful in the fight against # COVID19.
Download the app ⤵️https: //t.co/pbh45fQaoi pic.twitter.com/oNbSntPCAe

Its upload, announced for Tuesday noon, had been delayed several times due to a longer validation process than expected.

StopCovid was finally available on the Play Store for Android at 4 p.m. and around 6:30 p.m. on the App Store which allows you to download it on the iPhone. This delay unexpectedly increased the downloads of Stop Covid19 CAT, an application by the Catalan government probably confused with the French StopCovid.

The Catalan application found itself at the top of downloads in France on Tuesday on the Apple AppStore, ahead of the popular communication systems Zoom, TikTok and WhatsApp, according to a ranking established by the specialized company AppAnnie.

Will it really be used?

Described by the defenders of privacy, its adoption rate is quite good but does not foreshadow a massive and effective use on which depends its usefulness in the fight against Covid-19.

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It will also be particularly necessary to scrutinize the retention rate of the application over time.

In addition, doubts still remain about its ability to work well on a large number of smartphones, to the extent that its developers have not been able to benefit from the cooperation of Google and Apple. The two American giants indeed offer their own contact tracing platform, operating on an architecture incompatible with that chosen by the French.

To make the application safer and less likely to be pirated, it has just been tested by computer bounty hunters, paid for the vulnerability found. According to the French IT research institute Inria, project manager, seven security bugs were found as part of this program managed by the specialized company Yes We Hack.

These vulnerabilities - all of which have since been addressed - were reported by the same developer, Baptiste Robert (aka Elliot Alderson on Twitter), a reputable "ethical hacker" who made a name for himself by flushing out security holes in Aadhaar, the system Indian identification based on biometrics.