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.
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my country doesn’t really do this
This is so annoying, I don’t want bloatware on my new iPhone.
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.
These are all open-source and don’t track location, right?
Right…?
I mean they are known to be invasive, even trying to ban VPNs so don’t be too surprised lol
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.
I don’t see it necessarely as a bad thing. I would rather have my gov id app (for taxes, id and driving licence, public services info) on my phone when i buy it, rather than candy crush and other fucking bloatware. I think it would also help a lot of non-tech savy users set up their phones quickly.
Second of all, gov ID apps having their own store on the side is good. Them being only available on google’s store makes it so that if you want to access public services from your state you have to go through google (?), it is clearly not acceptable by a government standpoint, It is even worse than a monopoly.
I would rather have my gov id app
I’d rather have none of that. Give me basic system apps and an app store, and I’ll handle the rest.
If an org wants stuff pre-installed, there should be an option for rolling out a batch of app installs when issuing a new device (probably exists?). Outside of that, leave the base install as bare as possible, and give me an option to import everything from my old device (exists).
So you want apple to help pre installing something so you didn’t depend on Apple when users actually want to use the app. Can you tell me how this makes sense?
Its not about nicely asking apple for “help” pre installing some apps, it is forcing them to open up the os to different software sources.
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.
So you don’t believe anything that’s been leaked by whistleblowers? You think the Snowden stuff is all fake?
Depending a lie with whataboutism is a bad look.
Why not just admit you don’t know, but enjoy being paranoid and conspiratorial in this space?
Once: apparently the number of times someone has said “I enjoy being paranoid“
What lie? What “whataboutism”? The person tried to deny there’s any surveillance built into western technologies, and I gave a prominent example to prove them wrong. That’s not what “whataboutism” means.
Weird move for y’all to burn your astroturf accounts gaslighting people about what we’ve all personally witnessed from whistleblowers. You really expect that to work?
The NSA activities Snowden leaked were specifically happening in data and telecom centers to snoop traffic in transit. He make known some secret programs about exploiting and compromising devices, but of that’s already known as a possibility. He never detailed anything about backdoors on phones from manufacturers as you’ve suggested.
Right, the Snowden leaks did not include phone backdoors. Just everything else you denied.
Lol I’m not denying anything but your misguided comment. It’s not accurate.
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
How can it be a precedent of something else entirely?
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.
It really should be a binary thing. Company policy should be to ship the same, base OS to every customer in every country, and the only differences would be configuration for things like which radio bands to activate.
See what you started EU
The EU does not mandate that Apple preinstall government apps. Stop lying.
The EU went the other way and mandated that more apps should be uninstallable.
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Every government tells every phone maker what to do with phones. You can’t, for example, have them using restricted frequencies. Funny that you think you have a gotcha there.
Trying to equate mandating that the user can uninstall apps if they want (a massive win for the consumer and good for competition) to mandatory installation of government ID apps is hilariously pathetic.
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Saying someone is lying and telling someone to “fuck off” are not the same, one breaks rule 3 and the other does not.
You’re a liar.
Sorry you feel that way!
And what apps are EU forcing to pre-install?
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/apple-eu-digital-markets-act-changes/
lol yeah the EU mandates that users can delete more core pre-installed apps. It’s literally the opposite
Apple will let users delete core apps, including the App Store, Messages, Photos, Camera, and Safari, for the first time.
Fucking propaganda. It seriously enrages me how people like you have become so programmed that they’ll attribute everything to an organization you’ve been told to hate. Don’t you ever stop and see how you’re being used?
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I really don’t mind the concept of preinstalled applications as long as they can be easily removed.
I think Apple would pull out of India before they’d cave to this.
Apple will do whatever is profitable. Corporations don’t have ethics.
Yep. Late-stage capitalism incentivizes and rewards unethical behavior.
They’re pretty happy to comply with censorship in China though.
I don’t know why you’d think that? Apple is a publicly traded company that ultimately cares about profit and nothing else.
They already comply with a bunch of stuff in China and other places, why would India be any different?
To my knowledge, they don’t preload non-Apple apps on any country, including the full fascist ones.
Good morning sirs
