Aarogya Setu Github | Rs.3 Lakhs Prize | Aarogya Setu Android Studio | Open Source | DevOps Official
Government of India has provide source code of Aarogya Setu App on Github and requested developers to make their contribution in this project. In this video I will let you know How to set up open source Aarogya Setu App project in Android Studio.
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What's the BUZZ about Aarogya Setu Github open source by Government of India Officially?
In less than 48 hours since the Android code of the Aarogya Setu mobile application was thrown open for review, at least 165 issues of various levels of severity was flagged by the software developer community to help the government identify and plug holes -- from the way it uses Bluetooth for contact tracing to typos in the text.
The number and nature of suggestions that poured in could make Aarogya Setu, now being used by over 100 million Indians, one of the first big government projects to be improved through public inputs, experts said.
The government also rolled out a bug bounty programme, promising a reward of ₹1 lakh for those who discover bugs or loopholes in the app.
Starting Wednesday, anyone will be able to see and study the Aarogya Setu code on Github. The government said all subsequent updates will be made open-source through this repository and the iOS and KaiOS (on JioPhone) versions of the app will also be made open-source soon.
“This is a unique thing to be done. No other government product anywhere in the world has been open-sourced at this scale. Today, its scale and size is 115 million. It cuts across phones, IVRS. Only product available in 12 languages. All covid-19 related apps put together, Aarogya Setu is bigger than all of them," Amitabh Kant, chief executive of NITI Aayog said. The move should help the government quell questions around privacy that many have raised about the app. Privacy activists have demanded open-sourcing the app’s code ever since it was released.
“This will enable the vast number of entrepreneurs and businesses to build applications on top and unleash the “animal spirit" of the innovations in the post-covid world," wrote Ramesh Raskar, MIT Media Lab professor, on Medium. “The open-source code base will increase the trust further, unlock the innovation potential, and invite many engineers, designers, epidemiologists and policy experts to participate to provide improvements and suggest applications way beyond our imaginations."
It will also keep anyone from making false claims about what data the app takes from users, and let developers pinpoint the kind of data the app publishes.
Security researcher Karan Saini, though, pointed out that there are ways for the government to obfuscate the open-sourced code, which would make it difficult for developers to read the code and find possible gaps. “Obfuscating the code goes against the whole idea of open-sourcing," he said.
“People have flagged raised a lot of issues and while among these, many may be minor, what it really shows is participatory governance in the making,” said Srinivas Kodali, an independent researcher working on technology, data and governance. “But it needs to be extended to other governance applications and IT systems – it cannot be one-off,” he added.