NITI Aayog makes Aarogya Setu iOS version open source, here’s what it means

When NITI Aayog announced its Aarogya Setu app's Android version as open source a couple of months ago, it did say that the iOS version’s code will also be released soon. The same has happened now. Interested developers can access the code on the government’s portal, OpenForge, which can be called their version of Github. Like in the case of Android, there’s no access to its server-side code. 

The announcement of the iOS version’s source code was made via a tweet on Thursday. With the iOS code of the Covid-19 contact tracing app developers can inspect and modify it for their own iOS apps.

Government announced the Android version of Aarogya Setu as open source back in May, shortly after the time the app was being criticised for its handling of user data. Aarogya Setu launched on April 2 and it has so far garnered 15 crore users. This is the fastest for any Covid-19 contact tracing app in the world. It was also the fastest to reach 50 million users in 13 days. It’s worth pointing out that Aarogya Setu has been made mandatory in offices and in areas like air and rail travel.

Also read: Aarogya Setu now lets you delete your account, wipe app data

The app recently introduced an option for users to delete their account and erase all their data. A new update has also brought in an option that will let you share your health data on Aarogya Setu with other health apps.

These new changes are currently available only on the Android app and iOS users will get them soon. Aarogya Setu developers have recently also added a feature that lets you assess risk level based on your Bluetooth contacts.