Aarogya Setu becomes the most downloaded Covid-19 contact tracing app globally

India’s Aarogya Setu has recorded 127.6 million downloads till July 14, making it the most downloaded Covid-19 contact tracing app across the world. The government-promoted app has managed to achieve the feat in around 100 days from launch. 

A Sensor Tower report shows Aarogya Setu has the most installs to date followed by Turkey’s Pandemic Isolation Tracking Project and Germany’s Corona-Warn-App with 11 million and 10.4 million downloads respectively.

In the top five list of most installed Covid-19 tracing apps, Japan’s COCOA app has about 5.5 million downloads and Indonesia’s PeduliLindungi has approximately 4.6 million.

The download numbers comprise figures from Google Play Store and the App Store.

According to the report, government-endorsed Covid-19 contact tracing apps have been downloaded by about 9.3% of citizens across the world’s 13 most populous countries since March 2020. The countries are Australia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Peru, The Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam.

In the adoption rate of Covid-19 apps, India came in the 4th position with 12.5% of its population downloading the app. Australian government’s COVIDSafe app saw the highest adoption rate with 21.6% of the country’s population installing the app since its launch in late April.

Turkey and Germany were in the 2nd and 3rd position and Italy was at the 5th position.

In the list of 13 countries analysed in the report, India is the worst-hit by the pandemic. As of now, India has 9,36,181 confirmed cases of which 5,92,031 have been recovered while 24,309 deceased. The country has not been able to flatten the curve yet and likely to see a rise in cases. Globally, the US has 3,545,254 confirmed cases and it is the world’s worst-hit country followed by Brazil with 1,931,204 cases.

Besides aggressively promoting the app amongst government departments and private companies, the Indian government has been trying to ramp up the adoption of the Aarogya Setu app. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information (MeitY) had also rolled out a version of the app for Jio feature phones too to put a large section of its population under its ambit.

The Aarogya Setu app, which has been in the news over infringement of privacy of citizens, had garnered 50 million downloads within 13 days of launch on April 2 and took 40 days to cross the 100 million downloads milestone. It seems the adoption of the app then slowed a bit as it took two months to gather the next 27.6 million downloads. 

Going forward, it would be interesting to see how Aarogya Setu maintains its faith among citizens to track the pandemic and keep them safe.