Koronavilkku

» see koronavilkku.fi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Koronavilkku, Coronablinkern in Swedish, went onto both app stores on 31 August 2020 and was downloaded a million times before the day was out. The population of Finland is around 5.5 million. By 5 November the number was past 2.5 million, which gave it the highest adoption rate of any app of its kind in Europe, measured against the population it was built for. Nothing about that was guaranteed. Several countries spent more money for a fraction of the uptake.

The design was the strict version of the privacy promise. It never collected your identity and never collected your location. Phones near each other exchanged randomly generated codes that were rotated often enough that no sequence of them could be traced back to a person. If you tested positive, you were handed a code by the health service and typed it into the app, and the app then warned the people whose phones had been close to yours. It could not tell you where you had been exposed, or by whom, and the documentation never treated that as a shortcoming.

The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare built it and published both clients openly. The Android and iOS repositories went up on GitHub on 20 August 2020, eleven days before the public launch, and they are both marked archived now, with the last commits landing in the two weeks after the shutdown. For a government health product in 2020 that is an unusually clean paper trail.

I could not have used this, and neither could anyone else outside Finland. An exposure app is bound to the health authority that hands out the codes, so each one was a sealed national system that stopped working at the border, and the cross-border interoperability most of Europe promised arrived late and thin. There are five other apps of this exact shape already buried on this site, each one switched off by a different ministry in a different year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a million on the first day ~

The usage figures are better than the skepticism of the period would predict. 64,000 users reported their own infection through the app, voluntarily, with nothing enforcing it. THL's own closing statement says 23 percent of users had received an exposure alert at some point, meaning nearly a quarter of a 2.5 million user base had the thing actually fire at them.

The stated reason for the ending is the interesting one, because it is not boredom and it is not cost. By spring 2022 Finland had largely stopped testing at scale, and an exposure notification system is only as live as its supply of confirmed cases. Without testing there are no codes to hand out, and the app becomes a piece of software running correctly on nothing. It was shut down on 1 June 2022, still working, with nothing left to feed it.

~ the thank you screen ~

The last version of koronavilkku.fi is a single page, down from about 5 KB in March 2022 to 1,829 bytes by the middle of June, and it opens with the line "The Koronavilkku application has been shut down." It explains that the app no longer receives codes and no longer follows potential infections, then adds the sentence that makes this grave worth writing: "The app has been permanently shut down and will from now on only feature a thank you screen. Users can delete the app from their phones. The app will not automatically be deleted from your phone."

So the end state of the most-adopted exposure app in Europe was a few hundred thousand Finnish phones each holding an icon that, if tapped, said thank you and nothing else, waiting to be removed by hand. The domain itself does not resolve today. The page quoted above exists only in the archive, and the thank you screens went when the phones did.

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