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by rob74
2190 days ago
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Purely speculating, but the reason for GAEN being part of Play Services is probably that otherwise it would require an OS update to be installed, which means ~80% of the Android phones being used "out in the wild" would be incompatible (Ok, maybe a bit less in Switzerland). And (even more speculative), the reason for using GAEN instead of DP3T may be battery usage? So you could build a theoretically pure open source implementation, but then nobody would use it because it drains their battery twice as fast as normal... |
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"One difficulty of using Bluetooth in phones is that the operating system does not allow apps running in the background to use the Bluetooth advertising system. Hence, to do so,either the app must stay in the foreground, which drains the battery a lot, or the operating system must be changed. Apple and Google allied to provide a standard Bluetooth API which would not drain the battery. Hence, automated contact tracing apps must either be complian twith this API or make the user upset about heavy battery usage."
Singapore's TraceTogether app doesn't use GAEN api and does have this issue [2].
France's StopCovid app uses a different protocol called ROBERT[3], and they asked Apple to allow their app to run in the background[4]. So they also have battery issues.
[1]: https://lasec.epfl.ch/people/vaudenay/swisscovid-ana.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TraceTogether#Description
[3]: https://github.com/ROBERT-proximity-tracing/documents
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_Notification#Non-adop...