The Aarogya Setu team recently announced that the app has now been made an open-source. The app has over 114 million users and and new features are added quite often to the aplication. It is India’s first-ever contact tracing app which was launched in April this year working towards the spread of the coronavirus and has been a topic of discussion because of its privacy concerns. The apps’ rating last week was reduced to one star from two, out of five. Commenting on the source code of the app, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant remarked, “No other government product anywhere in the world has been open-sourced at this scale anywhere in the world.”

For the Android version, the source code of the application is available for review and collaboration on GitHub and the iOS version of the application will be released soon. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has invited the developer community to come and analyse the app for improvements.

The decision to release the Aarogya Setu app source code comes after several security issues were raised against the app. A popular ethical hacker suggested that the app has privacy issues and the app was reportedly hacked by a Bengaluru-based techie.

In addition to this, the government has also announced the bug bounty programme which will be hosted by the MyGov team. In this programme, researchers can avail up to Rs 1 lakh worth of bounty for finding security vulnerabilities within the app. Also, there will be an additional code improvement bounty of Rs 1 lakh. To get access to the source code you will need to head over to https://github.com/nic-delhi/AarogyaSetu_Android and sign up to participate.