JAjakey_bakey·Oct 24, 2024Submission
Source code of the NHS Covid-19 iOS app
2 points · Open discussionukhsa-collaboration
COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA
Objective-C2020–2024
ukhsa-collaboration / COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA · Archived
COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA
Source code of the Beta of the NHS COVID-19 iOS app
8Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
799GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Source code of the Beta of the NHS COVID-19 iOS app
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- ukhsa-collaboration/covid-19-app-android-beta · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-05-07 17:44:57 UTC to 2024-10-24 19:30:18 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
8 sources> The UK "hack" for the bluetooth was quite clever from what I saw - in essence they implemented the "background discovery of an iPhone" feature.
It wasn't that clever, it didn't work: https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA/issues/2
In UK virus-tracing app switches to Google-Apple modelJust making something public is not enough though.
The UK made their app public https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA But app only, none of the server-side projects. Germany and Italy https://github.com/immuni-app also made public some of their server-side components.
So there is no chance I will install the UK app as I have no idea what they will do with the data.
Obviously we cannot be sure the open sourced code is what their servers (and even app) actually runs but it gives more confidence.
In Source code of Germany’s official covid-19 contact tracing appJust to update for anyone time travellers that arrive here in the future, the source came out on day of the binary "going live" to the public
https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android-BETA
https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA
In Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing systemI'm delighted to see that they have a vulnerability disclosure program for the app too [1].
That's fairly rare for the public sector - the UK Gov and NCSC are really leading on this sort of stuff.
[1] https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA/blob/master/SE...
In NHS open-sources contract tracing iOS and Android appsYet, reading a recent report in [1]:
"The NHS contact-tracing app must not be rolled out across the UK until the government has increased privacy and data protections, an influential parliamentary committee has said".
The app requests location permission on Android, something that Google doesn't allow when using their implementation.
I suspect this app, in this form, is DOA and will be quickly replaced. Even if they do somehow roll it out widely, there are concerns in [2] about its effectiveness working in the background. This app is a complete disaster, and will be unviable for the mass tracing they will want to conduct. They've pushed and pushed for "why" a centralized approach is the "right" one, made blog posts, issued justifications.
Yet the app isn't likely to see mass adoption and isn't going to work due to restrictions within the
Read the rest
OS. This app represents the disastrous approach the government took to this virus. Flip flopping around, shutting down way too late, no clear guidelines or approach, and a high death rate to solidify their failure. Then, they decide the official approach is "wrong" or "not good enough".
Heads should roll over this.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/uk-coronavirus...
[2]: https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA/issues/2
Further context:
In the UK, NHSX (Technology division of the UK's NHS) rejected the Apple-Google contact tracing API to make their own COVID 19 tracing app using Bluetooth, and the source code for the apps are now open source [0] [1]
[0] https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA
[1] https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android-BETA
In NHSX Covid-19 App Has Google and Microsoft Tracking