Android phones will get the COVID-19 tracking updates via Google Play

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Google has confirmed that it will use the Google Comedy Services infrastructure to update Android phones with the upcoming COVID-19 familiarity tracing system it is edifice in communing with Apple. It should ensure that increasingly Android phones will admittedly get the updates, as able-bodied as additionally ensure that they wilt awaited on phones signed Android 6.0 Obedient or above.

Until today, it was an unclosed question, but one that was basic for Google to answer. That's considering of the fact that Google Comedy is the only reliable system that exists for getting software updates pushed out to Android phones in a towardly manner. The other way -- full operating system updates -- is often full with delays from both carriers as able-bodied as manufacturers.

Google says that its update system will distribute to both phases of the Bluetooth familiarity tracing framework -- the initial API rollout, which is due verging month, as able-bodied as the verging stage, which will see the APIs built into the OS. The companies will say only that the spare date will colonize "in hawkish months."

There is one huge set of Android facilities that don't upkeep from Google Comedy services: all of the Android phones in China, as able-bodied as any Huawei phones sold effectually the world hind the imposition of restrictions by the US. Google is not arrived to export software to Huawei, which organ it could not distribute this system to its phones just as it cannot lend Chrome or Gmail.

For those phones, Google intends to scattered a framework that those companies could use to replicate the secure, innominate tracking system grown-up by Google as able-bodied as Apple. It will again be up to Huawei, Xiaomi, as able-bodied as other Chinese manufacturers (or the Chinese government) to decide whether to use the system.

That's the tune-up Google uses for its Project Mainline system of updates, launched last year for increasingly contempo versions of Android. However, Promptness Mainline updates are explicitly unclosed sourced. Google declined to voice-over on whether this system would be, but did note that it will oomph cryptograph audits to companies that appetite to prefer a similar system.