Photo/Illutration Digital minister Taro Kono on Aug. 29 (Junki Watanabe)

COCOA, the central government’s COVID-19 contact tracing app, will soon cease to function although this time not because of some glitch that hampered its effectiveness. 

“The precondition for using COCOA will change, so it will stop working,” said Taro Kono, minister of the Digital Agency, on Sept. 13 at a news conference.

Starting from Sept. 26, the central government will simplify the system of counting all COVID-19 patients, meaning the app will only notify certain people that they have been in contact with infected people.

Kono said he has worked with the health ministry and will tell COCOA users to delete the app after a detailed schedule is decided.

COCOA was introduced in June 2020. The central government spent about 400 million yen ($2.8 million) on it as a measure to prevent infection clusters.

The app failed many times, however, and users did not receive a notice even when they had come into contact with infected people. 

According to the health ministry, 40 million downloads had been made as of the end of August this year.

The ministry said when it was launched that it would need about 60 percent of the population to download the app for it to work well.

But the result was far from it.

“We should thoroughly review what went wrong with COCOA and if there were good aspects of COCOA” for the government to manage the next pandemic better, Kono said.

(This article was written by Yasuyuki Onaya and Junki Watanabe.)

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A smartphone screen displays COCOA, a coronavirus contact-tracing app provided by the government. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

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