Local Difficulties
This morning I checked on the Covid-19 tracker app and found that County Kildare is in second place behind Dublin for cases:

Today’s figure of 68 is down on yesterday’s (174) but still too high.
Anyway a couple of hours later I picked up my phone again and discovered that it was very hot and the battery almost flat. It turns out that a bug has emerged that causes some kind of runaway interaction between the Covid-19 tracker and Google Play Services on Android phones.
I tried some of the fixes suggested on social media but they didn’t work, so I have now uninstalled the app. At a guess I’d say there some upgrade was pushed out to one or other app which has somehow triggered the failure. It’s not good that this has happened in the middle of a spike in cases but hopefully they can fix it soon.
It’s worth noting that although the app has been downloaded over a million times, I’ve never seen more than about 250,000 checked in on any day. There’ll probably be a lot fewer than that now!
Follow @telescoper
August 9, 2020 at 10:40 pm
285218 checked in as of now. I have never seen the point of the “check in how you are feeling” function, but did it for the first time today.
August 9, 2020 at 10:47 pm
If you’re using an android phone did you experience the battery drain thing?
August 10, 2020 at 10:50 am
No, i have not had any such problems.