[Replicant] Exposure Notification not working

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 10:16:31 +0100
Nick <replicant at njw.me.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
Hi,

> I want to use the national app that my government recently made 
> available that uses the Exposure Notification system to alert me of 
> people I've been in contact with who turn out to have been 
> infectious.
The easiest way would be to have a free software application that does
the same thing, but I've no idea if some people coded that or not.

Do you have links or pointers to find more information on what
the 'Exposure Notification system' is? More importantly, do you know if
there are enough technical documentation on it to enable anyone to
implement a compatible free software application?

In France there is also a government application that is somewhat
similar to what you describe but I didn't have the time to look if
there was any technical documentation on it or not.

There seem to some Wikipedia articles on the topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_tracing

Given that the COVID-19_apps points to free software code as well, it
might be interesting to research that and understand in which countries
free software applications could work easily and if complete
applications do exit yet or not.

> I found that the microG project have implemented this in their 
> alternative to Google Play Services, which is great. However, after 
> installing it, and then installing the exposure notification app 
> from my country (NHS Covid-19 app), the Exposure Notification check 
> seems to fail.
> 
> Could this be due to Replicant not supporting BLE (I 
> have no idea if it does)?  I installed the bluetooth firmware on my 
> phone (i9300) specially, so at least basic bluetooth is active.
Wikipedia says that it the Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300) has 'Bluetooth 4.0'
but doesn't mention BLE at all.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_v4.0 we have:
> "Bluetooth Low Energy, previously known as Wibree,[83] is a subset of
> Bluetooth v4.0 with an entirely new protocol stack"

And from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy we have:
> Bluetooth Low Energy technology operates in the same spectrum range
> (the 2.400–2.4835 GHz ISM band) as classic Bluetooth technology, but
> uses a different set of channels. Instead of the classic Bluetooth
> seventy-nine 1-MHz channels, Bluetooth Low Energy has forty 2-MHz
> channels

So given that (1) It most probably wasn't supported with the stock
Android distribution and that (2) BLE most probably requires hardware
support for it in the Bluetooth controller, it most probably doesn't
work on that device.

I didn't check if the chip / hardware was capable of BLE or not. If
anyone is curious and wants to check, the Bluemon project probably has
the infos on that. It would be nice to have a free firwmare for
Bluetooth and WiFi but so far no one implemented that yet.

Denis.
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