Herald – Bluetooth contact tracing protocol

I used the Australian COVIDSafe ios app today which uses herald. The only way it can keep the app receiving Bluetooth while in the background is to request location permissions and show the blue ios bar at the top that says “COVIDSafe is using your location”.<p>It’s a hack. Nobody seems to spell that out in the media coverage about it. Yes it works some of the time, but only under very specific circumstances.<p>Someone needs to tell it straight. It doesn’t work, we should just use the platform provided apis and be done with it.<p>Edit: this is an excellent summary of what’s wrong with the Australian app:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;AU-COVIDSafe&#x2F;mobile-android&#x2F;issues&#x2F;30" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;AU-COVIDSafe&#x2F;mobile-android&#x2F;issues&#x2F;30</a>

The market for this product is governments who stubbornly refuse to use the exposure notifications framework because they think they know better. It’s a pile of trash that drains the battery, particularly on older phones.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;AU-COVIDSafe&#x2F;mobile-ios&#x2F;issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;AU-COVIDSafe&#x2F;mobile-ios&#x2F;issues?q=is%3Aiss...</a>

Very interesting how they made this work on iOS, given so many failed (before the Apple&#x2F;Google protocol was released). A lot of the design documentation references the UK market, I wonder if VMWare were asked&#x2F;volunteered to help with the NHSX app that tried to ignore the Apple&#x2F;Google &quot;blessed&quot; approach.<p>&gt; Provides a number of approaches to workaround the ‘iOS detection in the background’ bug in iOS to a point where detection and continuity is superior to existing protocols<p>The technical details on the protocol (seperate from the &quot;payload&quot; which is contact tracing specific data) are here[1], and the iOS library here[2]. I would be interested if anyone else has verified these claims.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vmware.github.io&#x2F;herald&#x2F;specs&#x2F;protocol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vmware.github.io&#x2F;herald&#x2F;specs&#x2F;protocol</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vmware&#x2F;herald-for-ios" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vmware&#x2F;herald-for-ios</a>

Is there a short summary of what this purports to provide that the Apple&#x2F;Google APIs do not?

New York has a bluetooth based app as well. I keep bluetooth off because it drains the battery. So after a while I deleted the app because I couldn&#x27;t remember to keep turning bluetooth on.