Aarogya Setu app enters 150 Mn user club in 4 months

The Covid-19 contact tracing app Aarogya Setu has been downloaded by over 150 million users in four months from its launch. On July 14, the app had 127.6 million downloads and it has taken around a month since to reach the 150 million downloads milestone.

To recall, Aarogya Setu had garnered 50 million downloads within 13 days of launch and took 40 days to cross the 100 million downloads mark.

The government-promoted app also became the most downloaded Covid-19 tracing app globally. According to a Sensor Tower report, Aarogya Setu was far ahead of apps of other countries in terms of downloads. Last month, Turkey’s Pandemic Isolation Tracking Project and Germany’s Corona-Warn-App had registered 11 million and 10.4 million downloads respectively.

Japan’s COCOA and Indonesia’s PeduliLindungi were also in the top five list of government-backed Covid-19 tracing apps.

To bring more citizens under its ambit in its effort to counter the pandemic, the government had aggressively promoted the app amongst its various departments and even private companies. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information (MeitY) rolled out a version of the app for Jio feature phones too to make it widely available. 

During its initial days, there were reports around the security and privacy issues surrounding the app. However, the Indian government made it an open-source app to ensure its transparency.