StopCovid: a few hours of delay in switching on in application stores

The contact tracking application, StopCovid should have been available in the Apple and Android (Google) application stores as of this Tuesday afternoon. It is not so.

Read also: Le Figaro has tested the StopCovid application for you, available from today

Inria, which manages the project, explains that "final adjustments" were necessary to cope with a "possible massive influx of requests" . The problem had to be resolved quickly, a source in Le Figaro said during the day . The information that the application was rejected by Apple would therefore be completely false, in addition to the many truncated information surrounding the launch of this service.

It was finally around 4 p.m. that Stopcovid appeared in the Google Play application store, AFP noted Tuesday around 4:00 p.m. Publication on the Apple application store should follow quickly, a- was it indicated in the entourage of the State Secretariat for Digital Cédric O.

Spanish application tops downloads

The delay led to a lot of sarcastic comments on Twitter. It also led an application by the Catalan government, Stop Covid 19 CAT, to be at the top of downloads in France on Tuesday on the Apple application store, ahead of Zoom, TikTok and WhatsApp, according to a ranking established by the specialized company AppAnnie. They were probably Internet users confusing the two applications.

StopCovid must allow its users to be warned if they have recently encountered, within a meter and for more than 15 minutes, another user who has been found to be contaminated by the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19. The application was developed under the direction of the French IT research institute Inria with the help of developers from private companies such as Orange and Capgemini. It is built on a different architecture from the contact tracking platform offered by Google and Apple, and therefore did not benefit from the cooperation of the two American giants.