Business Insider: Ireland’s contact-tracing app has done so well that US states want to use it

Ireland’s COVID-19 contact tracing app has been so successful that officials from other countries, including the US, want to use it.

Ireland’s app, which launched on July 7, and is called COVID Tracker, was developed by a software company called NearForm. It reached 1.3 million downloads in its first week, roughly 37% of people in Ireland over 16 years old.

A day after the app launched, NearForm’s CEO Cian Ó Maidín tweeted the company had found “a solution for contact tracing for governments. The NearForm team can get a national contact tracing system launched in one month.” On July 20, NearForm and Ireland’s health authority, the Health Service Executive (HSE), donated the code to an open-source project called the Linux Foundation Public Health Initiative.