The government application would be installed on 51.4 million smartphones and tablets in France.
In one article, The Parisian reveals enlightening statistics on the level of use of the application AllAntiCovid in France. The newspaper, which consulted a report from the Ministry of Health and the State Secretariat for Digital, indicates that 51.4 million phones and tablets have downloaded the application at least once since its launch (34.2 million downloads on Android, 17.2 million on iOS). An undeniably excellent figure, but not necessarily easy to grasp. What does a download of AllAntiCovid ?
Multiple downloads per person?
First, let’s review the 51.4 million downloads that the government boasts. Since the app does not directly identify each user, it is impossible to know how many people have actually installed it. In these 51.4 million, there are necessarily some who have downloaded AllAntiCovid on several devices or who have changed smartphones during the year. On Twitter, the researcher Gaëtan Laurent ironically on the number of downloads of AllAntiCovid higher than the estimated number of smartphones in France.
However, it is difficult to speak of a false success. Even imagining that several million downloads are falsely counted, AllAntiCovid is an extremely popular application. If the government was wrong in indicating that it was the most popular French application, but AllAntiCovid is indeed installed on a large majority of French smartphones.
38 million users in January, but what for?
In his article, The Parisian communicates a slightly more concrete number: 38 million. This is the number of people who opened AllAntiCovid in January. This figure is equivalent to what is called “MAU” in tech jargon, for “Monthly Active Users”. The government’s counting protocol is not communicated, but one can imagine that opening the application on a device is enough to declare a connection, even if it is not used afterwards.
Here again, can we conclude with success? On the surface, yes. But remember all the same that initially, AllAntiCovid was to be used for contact tracing. The application, when it was still called StopCovid, should alert you if you have spent too much time with a positive person.
Today, AllAntiCovid rarely used for this task. It is a mega-application centralizing lots of data on the Covid and, above all, a wallet for health/vaccination passes. One can very easily imagine that these additional functionalities interest a large number of users of the application, even if alternatives exist to have the pass otherwise. At a time when the pass is compulsory in many places, AllAntiCovid has mechanically become an obligatory point of passage.
What about contact tracing? According to the report, 24% of users who tested positive have the reflex to indicate it in the application, which is much more than in the whole of 2021 (11%). This higher engagement rate and the surge in cases allow exposure notifications to rise again (one million notifications in the last 20 days). One might therefore believe that contact tracing works better, even if it is mainly the daily number of cases that artificially inflates these figures. By changing strategy, the government has clearly won its bet with AllAntiCovid. Still, his initial plan is not there for much.
