From reviews on Google’s Play Store, the social tracing app seems to have problems with some smartphone models. Here’s which ones and why
Available on the App Store and Google Play Store, Immuni is finally ready for initial testing in four regions of Italy. The social tracing app is supposed to allow you to follow the epidemiological link of the infected and thus alert all the people who, in a given time frame, have come into contact with him.
Already from the very first hours, however, several dozens of users are reporting on the Android page of the app malfunctions.
Already in the first hours, however, several dozen users are reporting malfunctions on the app’s Android page.
As you can read from reviews on the Google Play Store, almost all owners of a Huawei smartphone are complaining about Immuni s failure to work in the background and the inability to receive exposure notifications (i.e., the part of the code developed by Google and Apple to send notifications in case of contact with an infected person). Behind these issues, most likely, lies a problem independent of the will of Bending Spoon and of the Chinese manufacturer itself.
Immuni doesn’t work on Huawei and Honor: what are the problems and why it (probably) doesn’t work
Probable, in fact, that the incompatibility problems that are being recorded in these hours depend on Trump’s ban, which from May 2019 prevents Huawei from having any commercial and technological relationship with U.S. companies. Google included. Among the effects of the U.S. President’s executive order we also find the inability for Huawei to access Google Mobile Services (or “Google Mobile Services”), which allow apps from the Play Store to interface with smartphone components. Such as Bluetooth, to be precise, or the system of receiving notifications managed directly by Google.
For this reason, therefore, Immuni cannot run in the background on Huawei smartphones, nor can it receive exposure notifications, which are essential to understand if you have been in contact with someone infected. At the moment, therefore, the social tracing app is useless.
How to fix Immuni issues on Huawei
At the moment, users can do little except wait. As we’ve tried to explain, this is a technical issue, which is also beyond Bending Spoon’s ability to find a solution. But it’s not the end of the story: visiting the app’s official portal, in fact, you’ll find that on the “Download the app” page there’s a third banner, in addition to the Play Store and App Store ones. This is the Huawei App Gallery, the application store that the Chinese giant has begun to invest heavily in after Trump’s ban.
It is likely, therefore, that the Milanese developer is finishing a version of Immuni that uses Huawei Mobile Services instead of Google Mobile Services and that, therefore, eliminates all the compatibility problems that have emerged in recent hours.