Midst of COVID-19, the Indian government’s contact tracing app — Aarogya Setu raised a lot of controversies after experts seek how the government is going to protect user’s data shared with the app. And now wrapping up all our doubts finally the Indian government has open-sourced the code of the Aarogya Setu app.
Aarogya Setu app already has 10 crore registered users and this move made by the government fortifies the real motives of the app and shows how the user’s data is protected. In short, open sourcing the app code is the first step towards improving user trust and security.
41 days after its launch in April, NITI Aayog has released the source code of the Android version of the Aarogya Setu app on GitHub, and developers are also planning to open source the code of its iOS and KaiOS versions within the next two weeks.
“I just want to point out that this is a very very unique thing to be done. Open-sourcing Aarogya Setu is a unique feat for India. No other government product anywhere in the world has been open-sourced at this scale anywhere in the world.” — said NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant.
98% of Aarogya Setu installs are on Android devices that’s why NITI released the Android version source code first. The app has been open-sourced with the Apache 2.0 license — which means anyone can freely use and change the code, as long as a notice of the change is carried with the code.
