Apple and Google want your phone to become a coronavirus tracking device. Can it really work?

Apple and Google grew into global forces by creating wildly popular devices and applications. Their products became iconic for their elegant, user-friendly designs, and for their ability to handle heaps of data. Now those companies, who have often gone head-to-head in the past, are trying to apply that technical sensibility and mass appeal to develop a huge program to help track — and ultimately contain — the spread of the coronavirus.

But despite their position as some of the most sophisticated smartphone technology makers in the world, they've never faced a task quite like this. In its scale and complexity, the pandemic adds tremendous challenges to all the normal questions that come with technology design, such as privacy and usability concerns. Chief among them: Can they even get enough people to use their solution for it to really work?