[jkaplowitz]

It doesn't limit travel - those decisions are still made by each country individually with some guidance from the EU. The EU does not have control over what COVID entry requirements a country sets, beyond making recommendations.

All the document and its regulation do is say, "if you impose entry requirements based on vaccination / testing / recovery, you must accept at least these types of vaccines / tests / recovery specifics and you must accept this document (if genuine) as proving what it says, and all of this on a non-discriminatory basis regardless of nationality or place of occurrence." The document itself is never made mandatory by the EU and alternative proofs for entry to a member state must be accepted.

(Why do I say "document" instead of app? From the user perspective, you can print it on paper, present it as a PDF, or use one of many interoperable national apps among other ways to present it.)

So, the restrictions you're unhappy about are imposed by countries in reaction to COVID; the document we're discussing just sets some minimum allowed level of ease in satisfying national entry requirements.

[chitowneats]

Sure. I've edited my comment to indicate that the application "eases" the limiting of movement of people within the EU. It serves no other purpose.

[jkaplowitz]

It doesn't ease the limiting of movement though - it actually restricts the ability of countries within the EU to limit movement, easing the movement itself. If the EU had taken no action to create the EU DCC and the associated regulation, countries would be freer to limit movement than they are now.

[chitowneats]

The parent comment was correct. The app, in and of itself, is just a tool. Your comment gives this away by including the clause "and the associated regulation".

That being said, it is a tool built for a single purpose. "Papers, please".

If we're lucky, the scope of use for this tool will not expand. I don't like having to get lucky.

[NoPie]

It would be great, if the certificate was enough to show at the boarding gate to be able to travel. However, this is not the case – the countries still require to fill long poorly developed forms with a lot of private information. Some of these forms (Latvian forms) doesn't even check the certificate, only asks to check the box that you have one.

It could be worse without the certificate for sure. But I don't think that all this extra effort to set up the system, to deal with falsifications etc. was worth it. The EU could simply make a law requiring to accept the vaccination proof of any country and that would be it.