Apple has introduced underpinning support in iOS 16.4 for health departments to discontinue using the Exposure Notifications API. Users will receive a notification on their iPhones notifying them of the choice when a health authority decides to stop supporting the feature.
“Exposure Notifications have been disabled by your health authority. The notification states that because your iPhone is no longer monitoring adjacent devices, it will be unable to alert you to potential exposures. “Previous exposure data is deleted automatically.”
The Exposure Notification platform, which Apple and Google had high hopes for, failed to catch on due in large part to a dispersed implementation by states and health organizations around the world. For instance, in the United States, each state’s public health authority decided to support Exposure Notifications rather of developing a single contact tracing app.
The API has to be adopted before each state could create its own Exposure Notifications application. The “Exposure Notifications Express” technology eventually made its debut, integrating the function directly into iOS 13.
