BERLIN, July 31 (Xinhua) -- The European Commission would assign German telecom company Deutsche Telekom and software giant SAP to build a software platform that would link COVID-19 apps from different countries, Deutsche Telekom confirmed to Xinhua on Friday.
A spokesperson for Deutsche Telekom said that the Commission's assignment was "close to completion." The German news magazine WirtschaftsWoche first reported the EU decision.
The platform would enable COVID-19 warning apps by different countries to communicate with each other so that alerts could also be activated across borders, according to Deutsche Telekom.
The first European countries to participate in the cooperation, such as the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark, would also use decentralized solutions, said the company.
Germany's COVID-19 warning app is based on a decentralized software architecture that only stored data on users' mobile phones instead of a central server.
The app, launched in mid-June, was developed by Deutsche Telekom and SAP. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the app had been downloaded 16.4 million times by Tuesday. Enditem
