On June 18, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the federal government would partner with enterprise technology company BlackBerry Limited and ecommerce firm Shopify to develop a voluntary, anonymous contact tracing app to manage the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada.

[10] The app was developed by the COVID Shield project, an open source reference implementation backed by volunteer employees of Shopify and the Linux Foundation Public Health initiative, and the Canadian Digital Service, with BlackBerry providing security guidance.

[11][12] On July 23, after a delay from an originally-anticipated soft launch in early-July, Canadian Digital Service announced that it would begin beta testing the COVID Alert app in Ontario.

[19] In comparison to COVID Alert, it provided contact tracing details directly to Alberta Health Services, but could not run in the background on iPhone due to iOS limitations (requiring it to be open and in the foreground in order to operate correctly).

[20][19] The app faced criticism over this limitation, as well as over possible privacy concerns, with calls for the provincial government to migrate to COVID Alert instead, so as to assure more efficient operation on iOS and interoperability with other provinces.

[21][17] In August 2020, the Alberta government accused federal officials of "interfering" with its ability to work with Apple on releasing updates to ABTraceTogether in order to address these shortcomings.