Australia’s COVIDSafe is the most adopted contact tracing app by a country among the world’s 13 most populous countries with a government-endorsed app for tracking the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to data from Sensor Tower, an app intelligence firm, the COVIDSafe app has 4.5 million unique installs; which means 21.6% of Australia’s total population has downloaded the app from either the App Store or Google Play since it was introduced in April. This makes its adoption rate the highest in the group, and nearly double the adoption rate of India’s Arogya Setu. Although Arogya Setu has around 127.6 million installs, by far the highest among all the contact tracing apps globally, it has only 12.5% adoption rate.
The adoption rate of its app is also reflected in its rankings in the country-specific App Store. After its launch on April 26, the app even beat the likes of Zoom and Tiktok to remain at the top spot among the free iPhone apps for almost a month. The app currently takes the top rank in the Health & Fitness category for the country.
Contact tracing apps adoption rate. Source: Sensor Tower
Downloads of COVIDSafe peaked during the week just after its launch which also coincided with the government recording diminishing daily cases of COVID-19. The app continued to be installed 67,000 times on an average per week in the month of June.
COVIDSafe wasn’t Australia’s first official app to track the pandemic and ensure safety of its citizens. It had launched the GPS-enabled Emergency+ app earlier to help its residents make calls to the police and other emergency services. However, it has seen only 1.5 million installs, which is just one-third of COVIDSafe’s downloads.
Apps of Turkey, Germany and India followed Australia to feature among the top four most adopted contact tracing apps in this group of 13 most populous countries. The average adoption rate across these countries with government-endorsed apps is 9.3%, according to Sensor Tower estimates. Philippines’ RC143 has the lowest adoption rate, having been installed by only 0.2% of the population.
The analysis is based on government-owned contact tracing apps in the 13 countries with populations of more than 20 million. This includes Australia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Peru, The Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. Sensor Tower has used the current United Nations population estimates for residents in these countries aged 14 years and more, to calculate the adoption rate.
