In 2020, a large number of European Union (EU) countries has developed their own official contact tracing applications (CTA), which are designed to inform users about their exposure to covid-19. CTAs vary in performance indicators (e. g., number of users, number of downloads and installs of the mobile app) and the adopted technical design architecture. Many different factors are mentioned in the literature (such as app performance and accuracy, app malfunctions, data security and privacy) which can potentially affect the adoption and use of CTAs. Understanding such factors is critical for the further development of this type of technology. In order to understand these factors, this thesis systematically compares the technical design and the uptake of CTAs in EU countries. Only the latest versions of the official CTA (designed for iOS and Android) for each EU country were included in the analysis. Based on the results of the analysis, it could be concluded that there is a relationship between the technical design of official CTAs and their uptake among users in EU countries in terms of the number of CTA downloads. However, it would be difficult to claim that technical design is the main reason for the differences in the uptake of CTAs between EU countries since a very large variance in download rates exists between CTAs using the same protocol.
|