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.
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
True.
These are all open-source and don’t track location, right?
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.
No and No(For Digilocker)
I mean they are known to be invasive, even trying to ban VPNs so don’t be too surprised lol
Right…?
In addition to BHIM, there are lot of third party apps for UPI.
Also true. Its an open standard as far as I can tell.
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.
True. Not completely open I guess…
Stops a lot of scammers and if some gets through there might be a paper trail to follow and link the accounts involved to real people.
Especially with finance related stuff like this, its very crucial that such regulations exist. You’re right.