"With 5 million total downloads - the app has saved 3.7 million lost phones", this somehow doesn't add up for me, as this implies more than 74% of phones are stolen?
Or this this govt lying to pad the numbers to make the app look like a sheep in wolves clothing.
India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
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Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#22I'm shocked by people and state using the crutch of cyber crime or scams to push a totalitarian solution to a problem that is better solved by improved education and targeted campaigns against common security pitfalls.
I abhor any decision that robs even a grain of my individual freedom.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#23Very concerning. I will be suprised if companies like apple comply though.
Do they actually have a choice? Usually with laws and orders from the government, you can't do much than either go with the flow, try to lobby against it afterwards, or straight up refuse and leave the market. Considering Apple's ties to India, I feel like Apple is unlikely to leave, so that really only leaves Apple with the first; comply and complain.
> Do they actually have a choice?
Yes. Apple's revenues are half as much as the government of India's [1][2]. That's a resource advantage that gives Cupertino real leverage against New Delhi.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-reports-fourth-... $102.5bn / quarter
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen... $827bn / year
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the Achilles heel of having a closed platform. Eventually the government dictates what's supposed to be in it.
Even an open platform would do nothing. If you are a suspect, your phone would be checked in person (India doesn't have the concept of the 4th Amendment, and police demanding physical access to your phone during a search is routine) and if you were using something like GrapheneOS, it would be used as evidence against you. Indian law enforcement has already used access to Signal and Telegram as circumstantial evidence…
If it was open, truly open, wouldn't using GrapheneOS be easier and far more common than it is now?
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#25Do we have a breakdown of what this app actually does?
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#26I'm shocked by people and state using the crutch of cyber crime or scams to push a totalitarian solution to a problem that is better solved by improved education and targeted campaigns against common security pitfalls. I abhor any decision that robs even a grain of my individual freedom.
I share your abhorrence but are you really shocked? "Think of the children", "Stop the terrorists," these have been the foundations for the erosion of personal liberty for the past thirty years.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#27I wouldn’t venture in the direction that many here will take. I will point out that India have the highest number of victims of cyber-fraud. I personally know many people who have lost significant sums through social engineering attacks. The money is transferred to multiple mule accounts and physical cash is siphoned off to the fraudsters by the owners of those account. They choose helpless, illiterate, village dwell…
> I will point out that India have the highest number of victims of cyber-fraud
Based on what?
> Another huge issue is unregulated loan apps
You don't need to root everyone's phones to regulate financial crime.
> Then there are obvious security issues with terrorism and organized crime
India is building a centralised backdoor into every phone in the country. That's a massive national security risk.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#28I wouldn’t venture in the direction that many here will take. I will point out that India have the highest number of victims of cyber-fraud. I personally know many people who have lost significant sums through social engineering attacks. The money is transferred to multiple mule accounts and physical cash is siphoned off to the fraudsters by the owners of those account. They choose helpless, illiterate, village dwell…
And you trust the government to only use it for good purposes? and not to track people who may be protesting or belong to opposing political/religious/cultural views? We know based on historical pegasus complaints that this trust has to be earned and can't be given.
There are lots of ways to solve for this, mandating that these companies own the identification process through their systems, report misuse, govern apps. Why taken on the ownership of a process that is better handled outside of government while the government holds them to account via huge fines and timelines but giving these large companies ownership of protection from scams or stolen phones etc...? win win and I think these large companies are due spending extra money to protect their users anyway.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#29What should have happened is that they should have forced mobile vendors to allow users to uninstall all apps. What actually happened is that they are asking for their app to be installed as well, sigh.
Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
#30Do we have a breakdown of what this app actually does?
https://sancharsaathi.gov.in/
Basically IMEI stamping because sim card purchase with ID has come to be viewed as flawed/compromised by NatSec types in India. Here's some additional context from a previous thread on HN [0]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40476498
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Edit: Can't reply
Lots of old phones still exist, so a virtual/eSIM does nothing to give visibility into those devices.
Also, India wants to own the complete end-to-end supply chain for electronics like what China did in the early 2010s, so India has been subsidizing legacy, highly commodified electronic component manufacturing [0] - of which physical SIMs are a major component because they both help subsidize semiconductor packaging as well as IoT/Smart Card manufacturing. A mix of international [1][2] and domestic players [3] have been leveraging physical SIM manufacturing in India as a way to climb up the value chain.
On a separate note, this is why I keep harping about India constantly - I'm starting to see the same trends and strategies arising in Delhi like those we'd see the PRC use in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but no one listened to me about China back then because they all had their priors set to the 1990s.
No one took the PRC seriously until it was too late, and a similar thing could arise with India - we as the US cannot win in a world where 3 continental countries (Russia, China, India) are ambivalent to antagonistic against us. Even Indian policy papers and makers increasingly reference and even copying the Chinese model when thinking about policy or industrial development, and I've started seeing Indian LEO types starting to operate abroad in major ASEAN and African countries helping their vendors build NatSec capacity (cough cough Proforce - not the American one - and their Offensive Sec teams).
Ironically, I've found Chinese analysts to be much more realistic about India's capacity [4][5] unlike Western commentators - and China has taken action as a result [6][7][8]
[0] - https://ecms.meity.gov.in/
[1] - https://www.idemia.com/press-release/idemias-production-faci...
[2] - https://www.trasna.io/blog/trasna-eyes-asian-iot-growth-as-i...
[3] - https://seshaasai.com/products/esim-and-sim
[4] - https://finance.sina.cn/china/gjcj/2022-06-08/detail-imizmsc...
[5] - https://www.gingerriver.com/p/vietnam-or-india-which-one-wil...
[6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-02/foxconn-p...
[7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...
[8] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-files-wto-complain...