We are under a lot of pressure to deliver an App via the App Store to one of our prospects.
They are in a country outside the US, so we had considered just releasing to the App Store in that country. However that would entail additional delays, and therefore the current plan is to publish an initial release globally on the App Store.
This document assesses the latest App build (v0.9.6 ??) against suitability for this purpose, and highlights the key risks & quality issues that we have been able to identify. This draws on a combination of testing performed on the latest build,and previous project knowledge about the state of the App.
Expected Usage
The key uses we anticipate for the App are:
Evaluation & testing by one prospect in a small country outside the US.
Use in marketing demos with other prospects
Download and use by people across the world who have heard of the project, and want to begin storing their location data on their phone, in case they are later diagnosed with COVID-19
Other people who are interested in the project, which may include goverment researchers, other COVID-19 projects, Hackers, journalists etc. etc.
Note that usages 3 & 4 are usages that we are exposed to by the decision to release the app globally. If we limited release to a single small country, our exposure to these usages would be massively reduced.
Key issues and concerns
Security, Privacy & misinformation.
We know we have issues with Security & Privacy vs. where we want to get to - e.g. data stored unencrypted on users' phones. This is a concern given that the app may become widely used to store personal data in the US & elsewhere due to the profile of the project. Our Privacy-first messaging & non-profit status + MIT backing means that users will be inclined to trust us by default.
Risks therefore include…
Personal data breaches
Published analyses of security deficiencies by hackers/journalists
Reputational damage from both of the above.
Manipulation of naive users. Is there a risk that naive users could be manipulated into sharing their location data with organizations other than Healthcare Agencies? Can / should we do more to discourage / prevent this?
Exposure to fake sources of COVID-19 data. Having provided an app that consumes a certain kind of data, but not provided the data itself (the HAs), do we encourage unscrupulous 3rd parties to fill that gap with fake data?
Risk of high mobile data bills in the event users are persuaded to download data from an unscrupulous 3rd party si
Upgrade
We have not tested upgrade from this release to a future release. Therefore we don’t know that this app is upgradeable-from without loss of data.
Upgrade which changes data format (e.g. encrypts data) may be particularly problematic in future .
Confidentiality
If the App is published to the global App store with support for just 2 languages, does this leak confidential information about the location of a key prospect?
General functional deficiencies
Previously known defects:
#516 - We expect quite a few issues around false negatives in scenarios where both parties are moving > 10m / minute (i.e. anything but stationary). This is due to the tight 20m radius for detection, and the likelihood that phone’s timers for logging GPS data will be out of sync. This is a theoretical problem: we have not yet established how much of a problem this is in realistic scenarios.
New defects found testing the latest app.
### to be compleed.
New function: Select Health Authority during setup
Note any issues identified.
Country-specific issues, risks & limitations
We have not tested the translation with a native speaker. Therefore we do not know whether there are issues with context, quality of translation, mi-spellings etc.
When changing language, it is very easy to get into a confusing state where the dashboard shows the wrong language. It is then not possible to get out of this state. Raised here, but the bug report is not clear about how easy it is to hit, and hard to then escape from https://github.com/tripleblindmarket/covid-safe-paths/issues/609
Guidance issued to users may not be locally tailored - e.g. reference to Mayo Clinic; advice to ask to be tested.
Suitability for demos with prospects in other countries
Restrictions in available languages may be an issue.
Restrictions in function intended to make the release as robust as possible may cause problems
E.g. Google Data Import has been removed.
Issues believed to be non-impactful
Minor cosmetic issues
Top of text trimmed in setup pages #
Wrong shade of white in HA page # 620
Off center ripple on some phones: #617
Some text doesn’t fit available space on some smaller phones #618 (not known if similar issues exist in Haitian Creole as not tested on many different sized screens
Unknowns
Reliability of location logging. We have seen this spontaneously stop on occasions. We have not systematically tested for this yet, so there may still be weaknesses here.
Other vs. Quality Map
Precision of Info: Doesn’t give detailed info on contact, only day & duration - is that all MVP promised?