You Can Uninstall Those COVID Exposure Notification Apps Now
The official expiration(Opens in a new window) of the government’s COVID-19 public-health emergency declaration Thursday may bring a tiny upside to smartphone users short on storage: It’s now safe to delete the “exposure notification” apps that shipped as a pandemic safeguard.
The Association of Public Health Laboratories, which ran the servers that let these state-specific apps share warnings of possible exposures, has ended its support(Opens in a new window) and that of Apple and Google.
The software on your phone may or may not tell you that its time is up. On my Pixel 5a, the Virginia Department of Health’s COVIDWISE app—the first such app released in the US(Opens in a new window)—said “you can remove the app from your device.” But on an iPhone 11, the Settings app’s Exposure Notifications page gave no hint that the underlying system had been decommissioned.
Apple and Google did not answer requests for comment.
Apple and Google teamed up to develop this warning mechanism in the scary spring of 2020, when one of few things known about the pandemic was that being close enough and long enough to a contagious person hiked your odds of getting infected.
The resulting privacy-preserving, opt-in architecture—in contrast to the more aggressive contact-tracing systems used in countries like South Korea and Taiwan—relied on anonymized Bluetooth beacons sent and received from phones running these apps to monitor those periods of sustained close-up contact.
When you got a positive test at a government-authorized test site (as in, not an at-home test), you would visit your state health department’s site to get a random code to plug into your phone’s exposure-notification app. That program would then broadcast warning signals
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