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ukhsa-collaboration / covid-19-app-ios-ag-public

COVID19 iOS App
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Where is the live code? #2

Closed rachellawson closed 4 years ago

rachellawson commented 4 years ago

The most recent commit to this project was over a month ago - will we get to see the actual code that the app is running?

sihil commented 4 years ago

As an extension to this, how can you demonstrate or make it possible to verify that the code on the App Store is the code in this repository?

jagoosw commented 4 years ago

@sihil - apparently the correct way to verify open source iOS apps is "reproducible builds" which, as the original issue requests, would require up to date source code. Telegram does this: https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds

gawbul commented 4 years ago

The most recent commit to this project was over a month ago - will we get to see the actual code that the app is running?

I'm not an iOS developer, but could this be due to the time it takes to go through the review process with the App Store?

cooperj commented 4 years ago

My guess is that because of the nature of the app the would be given priority review slots.

DMBryant commented 4 years ago

No - they can commit the code to GitHub any time they want. There may be a delay whilst the public code is 'sanitised' of any internal references but it shouldn't take this long.

The most recent commit to this project was over a month ago - will we get to see the actual code that the app is running?

I'm not an iOS developer, but could this be due to the time it takes to go through the review process with the App Store?

nhs-covid19 commented 4 years ago

Thanks for your interest in the NHS Covid-19 project. We endeavour to release the code publicly on GitHub when we publish a new version to the App Store. The iOS app was Generally Available on 24th September, and this is when the source code for the app was published. Reproducible builds are a bit tricky on iOS for the reasons given in the telegram link, however the code here is absolutely intended to be a faithful copy of source code of the app on the App Store, except for any deployment specific configuration or secrets. We intend to follow the open source guidelines at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-source-guidance - the application configuration code is available at https://github.com/nhsx/covid19-app-system-public

paulchambers commented 4 years ago

The code here appears to match the release from the 24th but there was a second release on the 25th.

Is that code here? How can we tell?

gawbul commented 4 years ago

No - they can commit the code to GitHub any time they want. There may be a delay whilst the public code is 'sanitised' of any internal references but it shouldn't take this long.

The most recent commit to this project was over a month ago - will we get to see the actual code that the app is running?

I'm not an iOS developer, but could this be due to the time it takes to go through the review process with the App Store?

Yes, @DMBryant, I understand how Git/GitHub works. My question, or rather my consideration was - could the code have been the most recent iteration representative of the published app, but the apparent delay was because of the time it takes to get through the AppStore review? If as @cooperj suggests, they get priority reviews, then this may not be relevant?

As @paulchambers highlights, however, there was a second release shipped on the 25th that may perhaps not have been represented here at the time? Though, there appear to have been a number of changes pushed since then.