Health Bridge has dropped by 90% since downloads began

CHENNAI: With cities unlocking and authorities easing restrictions on its mandatory implementation, the monthly download rate in August fell by more than 90% compared to the launch of the country’s national contact tracing app Health Bridge in April. According to data from the app intelligence agency Censor Tower, Health Bridge had an average of 8 million downloads in April (when it first launched), with a steady decline in downloads with the August recording, with just 0.42 million new monthly downloads.
Similarly, the daily downloads of the app were 0.27 crore in April and 0.01 crore in August. “To date, Arogya Sethu has garnered 140.6 million (14.06 crore) downloads on Google and Apple App Stores, which is 13.8% of the Indian population,” said a Censor Tower spokesperson. In the Google Play Store, the app is number one for all app downloads from April 3rd to May 29th. It dropped in the top 10 download rankings on June 24th and had its lowest ranking on September 21st when it was ranked 107th among all app downloads. , Data is shown. The number of users who deleted or uninstalled the application could not be verified and the National Informatics Center (the developer of the application) did not respond in the same way to TOI queries. Developed by Meety, the health bridge uses GPS and Bluetooth tech to record the details of all people who come in contact with the smartphone holder and warn them if any of those people, at a later time, are tested positive for Kovid. 19. The fall in app adoption comes at a time when citizens are preparing to return to normalcy and tech-enabled contact tracing is becoming more complex. According to a recent study by Google and the Nafield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, with an app used by 15% of the population and a well-functioning contact-tracing workforce, countries can see a 15% reduction in the infection rate and an 11% reduction. Deaths due to Kovid 19.
The government diluted the regulations in May amid growing concerns over data privacy and enforcement issues, after making the application mandatory for public and private sector workers and for various public transportation. In addition to the concerns raised by cyber law specialists, the app was poorly reviewed by tech publication MIT Technology Review, which gave the app only 1 out of 5 stars to collect more data than needed.
To ensure transparency, the government has made the app open source and launched a bug bounty program asking security experts to report bugs and vulnerabilities. Earlier this week, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Sanjay Dhotre told Parliament that the Health Setu app had 15.71 crore registered users and had standard security features to protect the privacy and security of user data.