Aarogya Setu App Crosses 10 Crore ed s Mark in 41 Days of Launch 1h5w30 Technology News

The Aarogya Setu app has been the top free app on both Apple App Store and Google Play store in India. n1z47

By Jagmeet Singh | Updated: 13 May 2020 11:06 IST

Aarogya Setu App Crosses 10 Crore ed s Mark in 41 Days of Launch

Aarogya Setu app features a banner announcing “10.02 crore Indians” are using the app 1d4y2f

Highlights

Aarogya Setu app was launched on April 2
The app sured 50 lakh installs in three days of launch
Aarogya Setu app has raised privacy concerns as well

ment

The Aarogya Setu app has crossed the mark of 10 crore ed s in 41 days since its launch on April 2. Projected as the ultimate solution for tracing, the app has been in the eyes of critics due to privacy concerns. The Aarogya Setu app has also gained huge popularity in India specifically due to the fact that while it was initially voluntary to use by the citizens to limit the spread of COVID-19, it has been made mandatory at various places. It has been released by policy think-tank NITI Aayog in association with a team comprising citizen volunteers and government agencies.

hit the mark of 9.8 crore s just earlier this week.

#AarogyaSetu crossed 100mn ed s. Thank you India! We fight together, we stay safe together! pic.twitter.com/b9zEOSJCOV
— Amitabh Kant (@amitabhk87) May 12, 2020

Alongside its success on the part of ed s, the Aarogya Setu app has been the top free app on both enabling an Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) facility for non-smartphone s.

Aarogya Setu App Likely to Be Mandatory for Air Travellers Post Lockdown

Mandatory use — the key behind its success?
By crossing the mark of 10 crore s in less than one-and-a-half months of its launch, the Aarogya Setu app has become one of the fastest growing apps worldwide. However, gaining that success was not as difficult for the Aarogya Setu team as for any commercial app development company as the app received personal appeals from Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his public addresses. It also started evolving from being a voluntary solution to mandatory.

The government has made it compulsory for all private and government employees to have the Aarogya Setu app installed on their phones. “It shall be the responsibility of the head of the respective organisations to ensure 100 percent coverage of this app among the employees,” one of the recent guidelines released by the Ministry of Home Affairs reads.

Similarly, travellers who are using enger trains to travel during the lockdown are started enforcing the use of the app as well. All this has played an important role in growing its usage.

Court Seeks Government Reply Over Challenge to Mandatory Aarogya Setu App

Privacy concerns
Although the government and various private bodies are promoting the use of the Aarogya Setu app to limit the coronavirus outbreak in the country, experts have raised privacy concerns. Groups such as the Software Freedom Law Center, India (SFLC.in) and the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) have underlined issues such as the use of location tracking alongside Bluetooth access and the delay in open sourcing its code.

Recently, french security researcher Robert Baptiste, who goes by the pseudonym Elliot Alderson, or @fs0c131y on Twitter, also pointed out a flaw in the app that allows perpetrators to obtain information about the unwell people/ people who have done a self-assessment near them in a fixed radius.

Having said that, the NITI Aayog has so far issued a set of data processing rules that bar storage of data for over six months and specify a jail term for violators.

In 2020, will WhatsApp get the killer feature that every Indian is waiting for? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, the episode, or just hit the play button below.

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