The push comes as India seeks greater regulatory control over global tech companies. The initiative would require manufacturers to include the government’s GOV.in app store and related apps like BHIM, DigiLocker, VoterID on smartphones sold from India.
Beyond pre-installation, they also requested that their apps be available for download outside the company’s app stores from third-party sources without triggering “untrusted source” warnings.
I’ll be the paragraph guy today.
BHIM stands for BHarat Interface for Money, a payment application that uses India’s money transfer protocol called United Payment Interface (UPI). This makes all payments cashless, from ₹1 to ₹1,00,000. No transaction fees, as of yet.
Digilocker is a government document vault app that allows digital copies of documents to be enforced. You don’t need to carry around the physical copies, the QR code generated by the app is scanned by specialised scanners that validate the validity of the document and also fetches any relevant records. This includes the Driver’s License, Aadhar Card (Indian National Identity Card), PAN Card (Permanent Account Number; used for what is essentially a 2 Factor Authentication system of documents for verification of identity), etc.
Voter ID app is to identify your voting region, and make any changes to the details of your Voter ID.
The Gov.in store is new to me and I don’t think I need one more store on my device, but hey… I don’t use an iPhone 😄.
Why is all of this not a single app? Idk.
Coming back to the point, I don’t mind having important apps like these pre-installed. It helps to have these for people who aren’t as technically inclined as you’d hope.
Why is all of this not a single app?
Because they have very different functions though all associated with the government. It’s just better to separate apps with different functions.
Thanks for the explanation.
Fair enough. I just wish it were a single super-app since that’s more user-friendly. But its fine.
It’s an indian government venture. If the scope is too big app updates would be spaced out to every 8 years
Lmao. No. UPI is an open standard I think… Open as in you can apply to use it. It is run via the Reserve Bank of India to ensure safety and validity.
But no. None of these are open source. Location tracking is, I think, not across them all…
UPI apps use it because it’s easier to pinpoint where a payment was made, thus ensuring you can verify the payment receiver. That’s all I understand about it atm.
BHIM stands for BHarat Interface for Money, a payment application that uses India’s money transfer protocol called United Payment Interface (UPI). This makes all payments cashless, from ₹1 to ₹1,00,000. No transaction fees, as of yet
In addition to BHIM, there are lot of third party apps for UPI.
You might think that, but creating a third party app is not comes with a lot of hassles. One needs to get license to access the infrastructure.
This is so annoying, I don’t want bloatware on my new iPhone.
Wild how many people preach from their high horse every time a non-western country does this, as if there aren’t western backdoors built into all of these.
I’m against all government backdoors and spying efforts, but let’s not pretend they’re attempting anything the west has not already successfully done. There’s definitely an air of racism to the double standard.
What backdoors are pre installed on western phones? I’m talking actual backdoors on the device itself. I feel researches would have already found and altered to some very publicly.
Not only do the feds force companies to install backdoors into the OS, but they also have backdoors built into the processors and communications networks.
These are neither confirmed, nor have ever been proven, and don’t deal with phones.
The first link is about networking hardware, which has already been found by security researchers long ago.
The second is about an attempt at doing something like a backdoor that never came to fruition.
The last link has never been observed or proven, and how it would work is impossible to know. Having a “backdoor” on a CPU is meaningless without the other attached hardware to work with. Some would say impossible, and made up.
What are the nature of the apps? If it’s just things like digital IDs and government services, that’s not bad since it helps tech illiterate people accessing them. Big room for fash fuckery though.
And as always, preinstalled apps should be deletable.
No. If you allow one country to shirk the norm, other countries will also start pushing
I don’t think the slippery slope argument works here, you can object to any rules and regulations by saying other countries would start pushing bad rules and regulations if you comply. It’s not all or nothing.
I don’t think of it as slippery slope, I think of it as setting precedent
Russia already has a norm to show “Russian apps” the first time activating an iPhone or iPad, so that ship has sailed
The ship hasn’t sailed; the more countries you let do that, the more problematic the precedent becomes. This isn’t a binary thing.
my country doesn’t really do this
