A smartphone screen displays COCOA, a coronavirus contact-tracing app provided by the government. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
It took the health ministry two months to uncover the problems plaguing its COVID-19 contact-tracing smartphone app, which made it useless to Android users, after the bugs and their causes were first publicly pointed out in November.
The free contact-tracing app, called COCOA, was introduced to alert people if they came into close contact with someone who had tested positive for COVID-19. It is designed to notify users if they have been within a radius of 1 meter for longer than 15 minutes of other app users infected with the novel coronavirus.