GERMAN COVID APP ROASTED OVER OPERATING PROBLEMS

Germany's official app for tracking coronavirus cases did not function properly or even at all on millions of Android smartphones over a period of weeks, according to a media report, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported late on July 24, 2020.

Users of Samsung and Huawei phones, for example, did not receive warnings at all or in a timely manner if they had come into contact with the virus, the mass-circulation Bildtabloid reported on Thursday.

The problem was that a continual background update function was automatically deactivated when the app wasn't open - which the operating system did to save battery power. A spokesman for the SAP software company, which developed the app together with the German government, told Bild: "There was indeed a problem with earlier versions of the Corona-Warn-App in terms of background updates on Android devices."

The issue was also confirmed by the app provider, Germany's Robert Koch Institute agency for disease control. "Automatic synchronization in the background was disabled by some Android smartphones," it said in a statement, according to the report.