Help us stop COVID-19.
COVID Safe Paths is a mobile app for digital contract tracing (DCT) sponsored by Path Check a nonprofit and developed by a growing global community of engineers, designers, and contributors. Safe Paths is based on research originally conducted at the MIT Media Lab.
What’s truly special about Safe Paths is our strong commitment to preserving the privacy of individual users. We're building an application that can help contain outbreaks of COVID-19 without forcing users to sacrifice their personal privacy. For example, if a user chooses to use Safe Paths to maintain a record of their locations use a time stamped GPS log, which stores 14 days of data in 5 minute increments. The location log is stored on the user's phone. The logged data only leaves the device if the user chooses to send the information to an authorized public health authority (PHA) as part of the contact tracing process.
Safe Paths is designed to support a range of DCT and public health use cases. Currently the main build uses GPS for location tracking with GAEN BT tracing strategies in active development. Our roadmap includes adding support for other location and proximity technologies, symptom tracking, and communication with PHAs.
Project Aurora is the code name for a build from Safe Paths for an app that is fully compliant with GAEN. This build will not include GPS, and it will be compliant with all the rules and requirements for GAEN apps. Learn more about Project Aurora.
The Safe Paths app is being developed to support a variety of build 'flavors' of the application around core health and tracing functionality. Reach out to our team to discuss creating a flavor for your use-case.
Safe Paths is available as an app published by Path Check in the Apple App Store and the Google Play App Store. Any authorized pubic health authority can use Safe Paths.
We welcome public health authorities and other organizations implementing digital contact tracing strategies to create custom builds for their specific needs, incorporate Safe Paths features into their applications, or create downstream projects that stay linked to the Safe Paths project. If intending to fork the repository and develop off of it, be aware that this comes "at your own risk" for continued maintenance.
The rules for GAEN require that each public health authority release their own application. The goal with Project Aurora is to support this deployment strategy.
Safe Paths is designed to work with Safe Places, a tool for contact tracing teams to work with location data in the course of contact tracing interviews and to publish points of concern. Without having to sharing their own location history, a Safe Paths user can download the points of concern from their PHA to identify if they have had risk of an exposure.
One of the important aspects of the Safe Paths open source project is that it's supported by a large community of volunteers in addition to the open source developer community. Spanning as diverse domains as product management, user research, cryptography, security, compliance, design, and videography more than 1,400 Path Check volunteers are working together to support Safe Paths and help drive adoption around the world.
Original White Paper: Apps Gone Rogue: Maintaining Personal Privacy in an Epidemic
COVID Safe Paths Slack - This is where the community lives.
Safe Paths is built on React Native v0.61.5
Read the contribution guidelines.
View the architecture diagram for a basic overview on the sequencing of generalized events and services that are used by Safe Paths.
PathCheck is building two versions of the application. One for location based contact tracing and one for bluetooth based contact tracing. Given that the same application cannot have both gps and bluetooth enabled for privacy considerations, we need be able to build two separate version of the app for distribution.
We are following a white labeling strategy to accomplish this. That is, we have two build targets for each app which use the same codebase. For development, we are preferring to keep as much code as possible common between the two targets.
First, run the appropriate setup script for your system. This will install relevant packages, walk through Android Studio configuration, etc.
Note: You will still need to configure an Android Virtual Device (AVD) after running the script.
dev_setup.sh
dev_setup.bat
Note: In some cases, these procedures can lead to the error Failed to load bundle - Could not connect to development server. In these cases, kill all other react-native processes and try it again.
yarn run-android-gps ## for the location enabled app
yarn run-android-bte ## for the bluetooth enabled app
Device storage can be cleared by long-pressing on the app icon in the simulator, clicking "App info", then "Storage", and lastly, "Clear Storage".
First, install the pod files:
yarn install:pod ## only needs to be ran once
Then, run the application:
yarn run-ios-gps ## for the location enabled app
yarn run-ios-bte ## for the bluetooth enabled app
Device storage can be cleared by clicking "Hardware" on the system toolbar, and then "Erase all content and settings".
Privacy settings can be reset by going to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Location & Privacy
Generating a release build is an optional step in the development process.
react-native-debugger is recommended. This tool will provide visibility of the JSX hierarchy, breakpoint usage, monitoring of network calls, and other common debugging tasks.
This project is using typescript.
Run the complier with:
yarn tsc
Not every file needs to be written in TypeScript, but we are preferring to use TypeScript in general.
Note that for React-Native projects, TypeScript complication is handled by the
metro-bundler build process and there is no need to emit js code into a bundle
as one would do in a web context, hence the inclusion of the --noEmit flag.
This project is using prettier.
We have a local prettierrc file, please make sure your development environment is set to use the project's prettierrc.
This project is using husky to automate running validation and tests locally on a pre-push git hook.
If you ever need to push code without running these scripts, you can pass the
--no-verify flag on git push.
This project is using eslint.
We have linting checks on CI, please make sure to include the checks locally in your IDE.
Tests are ran automatically through Github actions - PRs are not able to be merged if there are tests that are failing.
To run the static analysis tools:
yarn validate
To run the unit tests:
yarn test --watch
Snapshot testing is used as a quick way to verify that the UI has not changed. To update the snapshots:
yarn update-snapshots
Note: Right now, there is only e2e test support for iOS.
e2e tests are written using detox. Screenshots of each test run are saved to e2e/artifacts for review.
To run the e2e tests:
yarn detox-setup ## only needs to be run once
yarn build:e2e:ios ## needs to be run after any code change
yarn test:e2e:iphone{11, -se, 8}
Mobile devices come in many different shapes and sizes - it is important to test your code on a variety of simulators to ensure it looks correct on all device types.
Before pushing up code, it is recommended to manually test your code on the following devices:
- Nexus 4 (smaller screen)
- iPhone 8 (smaller screen)
- Pixel 3 XL (larger screen)
- iPhone 11 (screen w/ notch)