PHapp AZ

To those who wrote reviews to this app. This was created for something far more complex. By my recollection, it was created in Arizona State University. Or one of them schools in the South West part of the United States, and was created I don’t know if it’s by criminology students or students in law school, but it was turned into a spy app for criminals. Dealing with your Bluetooth proximity. That’s pretty much really all I’m going to say for now anyways, until I find out a little more about it. I guess I should back that up and correct myself. It’s creation may not of been created by students for this purpose, but that’s what it was turned into. And I know that for a fact. But I’ve yet to experiment with the app. So I’m blind to its functions, strong points, or weak points. To give it a reasonable review, I’m not going to bash it’s head in for now. I’ll give it a four.

First of all, I had no idea AZ had this - have never heard a peep about it, and the last time I checked, AZ was not on the list. I discovered it when I was poking around the exposure notification settings on my phone. Without participants, this isn’t very useful, so AZ should be talking this up every opportunity! Including having the governor mention it in his pressers, as well as other leaders like school superintendents. Second, setup was confusing. The Settings app says my region (Arizona) has an app and directs me to a list of apps on the App Store, where this one is *not* included. I had to find it by doing a general search, and then it doesn’t say explicitly in the description that it relies on the Apple/Google system, which I wanted to be sure because otherwise I likely wouldn’t use it for privacy reasons. I couldn’t confirm it until I got it installed and saw the integration. Get the app properly listed on the App Store list, and make the Apple connection clear in the app description. Finally, I can’t tell the app that there’s been a positive diagnosis. Fortunately, I don’t need to, but without that, the value is significantly reduced. Why is this not included? And who in my area (Phoenix/Scottsdale) can report? Anyone?

I love the concept of this app, but I don’t think it was ready for release. To begin with, it is very unclear what the risk level ranking is out of (10?), as well as what that actually means. Each time I have been exposed it’s been ranked as a “6” with no further information. That seems like a high risk level, and yet no suggestions for next steps were made available as promised. Is 6 actually quite low? Friends who have had the same exposure times have much lower risk levels. Why is mine so high? Additionally, the notifications are very confusing. I got a notification on Sunday (8/31) that I had had no exposures during the week. Then on Monday night (9/1) I got an alert that I had been exposed... on 8/27 and 8/28. Today I got another notification for an exposure on 8/28. I am wary of these alerts because they all look exactly the same (risk level and time exposed). Are they accurate? Is it a bug? The time exposed seems inaccurate as well. For all three of my “exposures” the times are listed as: “0min, 0min, 3min, 0min” in that exact order. My friends have the same for different supposed exposures on different dates. This app needs more information and more clarity.