Bluetooth Background Advertisment
Dear Apple Community,
We are a group of volunteers working on an open source contact tracer app as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and we need your help.
The app aims to help get society moving again once the case numbers are under control and countries are in a position to ease restrictions on the movement of their citizens. The idea is to replace classical contact tracing when new cases of the disease occur. It would be much quicker to respond (hours rather than days) and much more scalable than traditional methods, making it possible to recommend self-isolation and quarantine measures quickly and efficiently to those affected.
The app will detect nearby devices or app users that it sees via Bluetooth LE and records how long it comes into contact with them. These are stored in a local database on the device (better for scalability and privacy).
If an app user reports that they have a suspected or confirmed case of COVID19, this will be synchronised with all other devices so that they can be notified and take appropriate actions.
We are aware that various governments have launched or are developing similar apps, however we feel that an open source option will be useful to encourage innovation and also to support those countries which are unable to build their own.
You can view our work here: https://github.com/ehidra/contact-tracer
We have made good progress on a cross-platform prototype however there is one issue which is causing us some problems: We are unable to detect iOS bluetooth advertisements whilst the app is running in the background.
Android keeps sending advertisements when the app goes into the background, but it would appear that iOS pauses them. This means the app currently needs to stay in the foreground to function which is not practical.
Does anyone know of any ways to solve this problem? Would we need Apple to modify their restrictions around Bluetooth advertisements?
We believe this issue is being faced by a number of other contact tracer apps such as Singapore's TraceTogether, which we think also requires iOS users to keep the app running in the foreground.
Regards,
Paul M.
iPhone X, iOS 13