Without Apple and Google, the UK’s contact-tracing app is in trouble

Countries around the world are scrambling to create contact-tracing apps that will help track the spread of COVID-19. But a beta app launched by the UK this week shows the huge challenges they face and, crucially, the difficulty in designing an effective app without the help of the tech giants that make our phones.

The UK is one of the few countries that has chosen to create a contact-tracing app that is incompatible with the contact-tracing API currently being developed by Google and Apple. Instead of decentralizing the data across...