I installed the Italian Covid19-tracing app “Immuni” on my Fairphone2 with FP Open OS.
If the app is designed to work with the Google/Apple solution for contract tracing, then you must have Google Play Services installed.
[Edit: Confirmed here that you need Google Play Services https://www.immuni.italia.it/download.html ]
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There’s an attempt to rebuild the Google/Apple contact-tracing api for devices without GPS (Google Play Services) - at least for the german corona app. But as the source API is the same for all decentralized DP-3T-based versions (Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and so on) I think there’s a possibility that it could work with other tracing apps too - once this open source implementation is available
opened 09:36AM - 01 Jun 20 UTC
closed 07:38AM - 10 Mar 23 UTC
mirrored-to-jira
community
microG
F-Droid
EDIT: **tl;dr**: We are working an an open implementation of the Google/Apple pr… otocol (I call it PPCP, which may be wrong). You can find and contribute to our repository here: https://github.com/theScrabi/CoraLibre-android-sdk
Dear Corona-Warn-App developpers we have read your code and documentation. We like your effort and your open mind for the community. As there is a small but willing comunity of people who refuse to use closed source Google or Apple dependency and so can not use the Corona-Warn-App, I'd like to discuss the posibility of a Google Free FLOSS solution.
What we know so far is that it's currently hardly possible to create the corona app without the use of the closed source GMS. This comes along with the [nearby android exposure notification API](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//covid19/exposurenotifications/pdfs/Android-Exposure-Notification-API-documentation-v1.3.2.pdf), which implements the [PPCP](https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing) protocol. From what we can see in the code so far, the *contact* points between the android exposure notification API and the Corona-Warn-App are few as for the most common calls to the API [a wrapper class](https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android/blob/43412bdabe128dc674ec8a9ef8baa80d37292a3a/Corona-Warn-App/src/main/java/de/rki/coronawarnapp/nearby/InternalExposureNotificationClient.kt) is used. That's great! Also there are only about 14 code files that include parts from the GMS library. We therefor think it might be feasible to create a version of the app that does not require GSM services.
As statet in [this issue](https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation/issues/5#issuecomment-627848335) the current maintainer have no plans to implement an own exposure notificatoin API, but might be open to support an alternative if available.
What we understand so far is that the part that runs the actual BLE contact tracing as well as providing a highlevel API for exposure likelihood and key handling would need to be reimplemented. We had several thoughts about how this might be possible.
- As its offtenly staded that PPCP is close to [DP-3T](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Privacy-Preserving_Proximity_Tracing), I question if it is possible to reuse some parts of the [prestandard DP-3T android sdk](https://github.com/DP-3T/dp3t-sdk-android/tree/prestandard).
- Prestandard DP-3T used [forground services](https://developer.android.com/guide/components/services). Would it be possible to implement a GMS free non root version that would always display a notificatino while running the advertising and receiving service? Now i know this is not a good idea as people tend to close this notificaion, but was it techinically feacable to replace GMS by such a sollution?
- A solution that would work on phones with root access such as Lineage-OS or [/e/](https://e.foundation/) could maybe be to introduce a privileged extentsion like the [one used by the fdroid app](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged/). This might make it possible to expose functions to the Corona-Warn-App that would normally only be accessible for higher privileged applications. Maybe this could be a replacement for GMS.
- One other way was to compleatly break loose from Smartphones and focuse on microcontroller based tracing beacons. For example on ESP32 or the [CCC Card10](https://card10.badge.events.ccc.de/). This way not only users with Lineage-OS or rooted smartphones could profit from an alternative implementation but also people who don't use a smartphone at all.
If a community based solution is possible what would be the next steps to go?
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Internal Tracking ID: [EXPOSUREAPP-5775](https://jira-ibs.wbs.net.sap/browse/EXPOSUREAPP-5775)
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This is very good to know. Since I heard that Google and Apple contributed to the contact-tracing technology solution I kind of expected the Google Play Services to be necessary unfortunately.
It is good to know that there might be an alternative solution at some point.
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