The health secretary has criticised Apple over the roll-out of the government’s coronavirus app, accusing it of “intransigence”.

Matt Hancock told Sky News the tech firm would not make a change required to make the COVID-19 contact-tracing app work.

Sky News has contacted the company for comment.

In a major U-turn, the government confirmed earlier this week that it was abandoning efforts to develop its own coronavirus contact-tracing app in order to focus on technology from Apple and Google.

Speaking to Sophy Ridge On Sunday about the change in tack, Mr Hancock said: “There were clearly problems with ours because it worked on Android, and Apple wouldn’t make the change to allow it to work on Apple.

“Of course I wish we had brought it in sooner, I wish that Apple had made the change for it to work in Apple phones in the same way that the original works on Android phones, but we will get there.”

He added: “The moment that Apple and Google brought forward their technology we started working on that as well.

“So absolutely it’s perfectly a reasonable point that people make that Apple have in the past also been intransigent in the face of perfectly reasonable requests from democratically elected governments to work with them on solving particular problems, whether that’s about solutions to terrorism or other technical problems.

“And so absolutely I understand that reluctance on their part and to be fair to Apple they may have good technical reasons for it which are under the skin of things.”

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