Coronavirus Australia was an app released by the

Australian Government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government i ...

designed to allow users to access information about the

COVID-19 pandemic in Australia The COVID-19 pandemic in Australia is part of the ongoing worldwide pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 () caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (). The first confirmed case in Australia was identified on 25 Januar ...

. The app was released by the

Department of Health A health department or health ministry is a part of government which focuses on issues related to the general health of the citizenry. Subnational entities, such as states, counties and cities, often also operate a health department of their ow ...

on 29 March 2020, and decommissioned two years later on 31 August 2022. Over its lifetime, the app was downloaded over a million times and was initially ranked first in the

Apple App Store The App Store is an app store platform, developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS Software Deve ...

's "Health and Fitness" category. Due to the short development period of two weeks, the app initially served primarily as an aggregate of links to official government websites. Shortly after an update was released adding a voluntary "isolation registration" form that collected the location, name, age, mobile phone number, isolation start date, and various other details about users who were self isolating. On 14 April 2020 a separate contact tracing app,

COVIDSafe COVIDSafe was a digital contact tracing app released by the Australian Government on 26 April 2020 to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The app was intended to augment traditional contact tracing by automatically tracking encounters b ...

, was announced based on Singapore's

TraceTogether TraceTogether is a digital system implemented by the Government of Singapore to facilitate contact tracing efforts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. The main goal is quick identification of persons who may have come into close co ...

app and

BlueTrace BlueTrace is an open-source application protocol that facilitates digital contact tracing of users to stem the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially developed by the Singaporean Government, BlueTrace powers the contact tracing for the TraceT ...

protocol. __TOC__

Development

The app was developed by recruitment house Delv Pty Ltd over a period of two weeks. Delv was hired by the

Digital Transformation Agency The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) – an executive agency within the Australia’s Government’s Finance portfolio – supports the digital transformation of government services. Since 1 July 2022 it has done this by: * providing strate ...

for , and the Department of Health for , totaling over . The app launched on 29 March 2020, three days after it was first announced publicly. Although initially rumoured to have similar functions to

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

app, it did not have such features at release. The day after launch an update was released adding a voluntary isolation registration form, and a web version was released to accompany it. Later, on 9 April 2020, another update was released adding an "essential information" tab and link to various translations of SBS news. The essential information tab added dot points summarising information about the coronavirus. The 28 May 2020 release completely overhauled the

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

, moving from a card based interface with a navigation drawer, to a tab and folder based one. With the replacement of the drawer with tabs on Android, the two apps gained a consistent navigation model. A news feed showing the latest news items has been moved to the home screen, with many of the cards that were previously present there moved to the tab bar or nested within a folder. Additionally, a custom

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content (content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

has been introduced, allowing for the embedding of native articles and content. The release on 9 July 2020 introduced a COVID-19 clinic finder and restriction checker. The clinic finder was built on top of the Australian Government's existing HealthDirect API, in contrast to the rest of the app which uses

Firebase Firebase is a set of hosting services for any type of application (Android, iOS, Javascript, Node.js, Java, Unity, PHP, C++ ...). It offers NoSQL and real-time hosting of databases, content, social authentication (Google, Facebook, Twitter an ...

Firestore and Remote Config to fetch dynamic content. On 30 September 2020, the contract for the development of the Coronavirus Australia app concluded, effectively ending major development of the app.

References

{{COVID-19 pandemic in Australia

External links

Google Play link

App Store link
Government software E-government in Australia 2020 establishments in Australia COVID-19 pandemic in Australia Software associated with the COVID-19 pandemic 2020 software Android (operating system) software IOS software