By KYOSUKE YAMAMOTO/ Staff Writer
February 19, 2021 at 14:58 JST
COCOA, a COVID-19 contact-tracing smartphone app to alert users if they have come into close contact with someone who tested positive for the novel coronavirus (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Bugs have been fixed in Japan's COVID-19 contact-tracing smartphone app COCOA, the health ministry announced Feb. 18, starting distribution of the updated version the same day.
COCOA, introduced to alert users if they come into close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, had failed to send Android users notifications since the end of last September.
Despite the correction, users still will have to restart the app once a day for it to operate properly.
The new version also fixes two other previously unpublicized bugs, one that kept some iPhone users from getting notifications depending on their OS version, and one that initialized the app on some mobile phones, mostly iPhones, after it had been used for a while.
The ministry had said on Feb. 3 that bugs were not reported among iPhone users.
In announcing the new update, the ministry asked Android users to update their phones to the corrected version and to restart the app once a day and asked iPhone users to update to the latest iOS14.
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