Slovenia will adapt a German mobile application in support of contact tracing for Covid-19 to its needs, Slovenia's Minister for Public Administration Bostjan Koritnik informed on Monday.

The coronavirus contact tracing app, which Slovenia will develop using the German open source solution, will be available on a voluntary basis for infected people to download on their mobile phones, including people in quarantine and others.

The development of such app will cost less than €40,000, Koritnik told a press conference in Ljubljana, adding that the app should be available very soon.

That application is already in use today in ten EU countries and more than 15 million people in Germany are using the app. The app does not allow geolocation tracking and it does not operate based on GPS but rather on bluetooth technology. Data cannot be stored and it protects users’ privacy and human rights, the Slovenian government said.

The government’s Covid-19 spokesman Jelko Kacin confirmed that the app will be very useful for Slovenian epidemiologists in revealing contacts of infected people.

It will be interoperable like similar applications in other countries, including Croatia’s app, which is important considering the huge fluctuation of people between Slovenia and Croatia, Kacin said.

Slovenia’s media has said that Slovenia’s version would be developed very quickly in cooperation with the National Institute for Public Health and local experts.