The Brexit settled status app works, but problems are lurking

One clear advantage of that cornucopia of opportunities known as Brexit is that freedom of movement from and to the European Union will end. Come March 29, the UK might have to convert motorways into parking lots, and rely on stockpiled food and medicine – but on the other hand EU citizens will not be able to move to the UK as easily as they were under EU law, which allows every EU national to freely live, study and work in any of the 28 member states.

There is a snag to navigate on the way to Global Britain: some 3.7 million EU citizens already residing in the UK. Since every single Brexit-backing – and Remain-backing – campaigner had declared ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote that residence rights of EU nationals already in Britain would not be impinged on, and since there is no way to tell current residents apart from devious EU newcomers sneaking in post-Brexit, the government has invented something called “settled status”. That essentially means that EU nationals who have lived in Britain for five years can apply to stay indefinitely, with their rights (roughly) untouched; those who are in the UK as of March 29 2019, but don’t meet the five-year threshold, will be bestowed “pre-settled status” and allowed to spend five years in the UK unimpeded en route to settled status.

To apply for settled status, EU citizens will have to use a smartphone app. An Android app, to be precise, given that it does not work on iPhones and Microsoft handsets – and even on some older Android model. The app has already been tested – and lambasted over various bugs – in two pilot phases open to a limited number of people in universities, NHS surgeries, and other public bodies.

On Monday, the app was launched for a much wider “pilot phase”, during which every EU citizen in the UK will be able to apply before Brexit happens. (If it happens.) I tried the app – not to have a laugh, but because I am an Italian citizen and I needed to do it anyway, sooner or later.

So, the Settled Status app is easy to find. While it is cumbersomely named “EU Exit - ID Document Check” , typing “settled status” quickly returned the right result on my Google Pixel’s Play Store. The installation was pretty smooth, too.

The app has two primary functions: scanning the applicant’s EU passport, and scanning their face to make sure it matches the passport owner’s. Following a curiously unscreenshotable privacy disclaimer with which the Home Office declared that it “may share [my] information with other public or private sector organisations” – which ones? why? to what end? – the passport-verification step started.

First thing: take a picture of the passport. That sounds easy, but office lights are not exactly the best at not producing glare – which was specially singled out by the app as no-no. I had to give it a couple of tries before a glare-free image of my document was finally captured. Following that, the app asked me for email and phone number and then prompted me to place the phone – no cover – on top of my passport, so that the handset could read the information on the passport’s biometric chip via near-field communication technology. It took a while and a good deal of shuffling the phone around, but it eventually announced success.

On to the face part – which was again a two-step process. Step one: scanning my face in motion, which appeared on the screen as a wireframed, black-and-white image out of an old video game. After a few seconds, the phone started flashing different colours on my face: that is the technique developed by UK startup iProov to winnow out fraudulent videos from genuine live faces. For what it’s worth, it seemed to work. Step two: a standard selfie – which I had to take twice because apparently my eyes were too small to be seen.

The next hurdle? The £65 application fee. Then Theresa May announced that the fee would be scrapped and the poor saps who had already paid would be refunded.

There was a final step to be completed – either on the app or on a desktop computer – and it mainly was to do with answering questions. Some were about immigration status – was I a EU national or a relative? Did I already have an indefinite leave to remain?– past criminal record? Was I a terrorist? A war criminal hellbent on genocidal activities? An extremist?

The most crucial set of queries required me to provide my address and my National Insurance Number – so that the Home Office could scour its records and ascertain whether I would deserve settled status, or the temporary purgatory of pre-settled status. I knew this was a treacherous territory: I have lived in the UK since late 2013 as a student, but I only applied for a National Insurance Number after university, sometime in mid-2014. And – as expected – the Home Office announced that “[I’ll] be considered for pre-settled status”, unless I wanted to challenge the decision. I slightly flinched at the language – rather jarring with the government’s mellifluous “we want you to stay” platitudes – but I thought better than challenging the Home Office.

What now? I received an email informing me that my application was under consideration. How long would it take? There was a link redirecting to a Home Office webpage supposed to answer the thorny question of “times”. It was essentially a blank page waiting to be filled with information.

Such sloppiness boded ill for the speediness and the accuracy of the reviewing process. And at this point I was supposed to rattle off an anguished paragraph about the probable endless hours of uncertainty. But I just got an email informing me that I have been granted pre-settled status.

One thing that is totally unclear from the email, though, is when the Home Office started counting my days here in the UK. Was it when I got the National Insurance Number, in mid-2014? Or one month later, when I started working? Or at any other arbitrary point? Totally nebulous – from the email, from my profile on the Home Office’s website, from my online application. Knowing when I will be eligible for settled status would be crucial to avoid last-minute applications that might easily go wrong.

While for me, the process has (thus far) been relatively straightforward, for others, it might not be.

The devil, as usual, is in the details.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK