The Australian Government has publicly released application code for COVIDSafe, the Coronavirus tracing application for Australian residents. The app, developed by the Government’s Digital Transformation Agency for the Department of Health, has been available for a little over two weeks, and received one million downloads in the first evening of availability.
The code was shared on GitHub, a popular tool for developers to share and build code, in separate repositories for the iOS and Android versions of the app. Both repos were made available by the newly-created COVIDSafe Github organisation, and doesn’t link to the Department of Health, the Digital Transformation Agency, or any of the developers who built the app.
Each of the two repositories have only one ‘commit’, or snapshot, titled “COVIDSafe code from version 1.1”. This means that these repositories are not the working repositories used by product developers, and are only used for purposes of sharing code with the public.
The iOS app was created in Xcode using the Swift programming language, while the Android app was created in Android Studio using Kotlin.
Having the code publicly readable allows developers to understand how the app works, and find potential privacy or security vulnerabilities. Although, it seems some developers have found more than that, as a Reddit user pointed out the notable omission of Tasmania from the app’s list of Australian states.
Apple’s own COVID-19 tracing features and APIs have been seen in beta builds of iOS 13.5, and are expected any day for public release.
You can download the source code from GitHub using the links below…
- https://github.com/AU-COVIDSafe
- https://github.com/AU-COVIDSafe/mobile-ios
- https://github.com/AU-COVIDSafe/mobile-android