The government on Wednesday rolled back an order mandating pre-installation of the Sanchar Saathi cybersecurity app on smartphones sold in the country.
A statement this afternoon said the order to all manufacturers – including Apple, which reports said was preparing a challenge – had been withdrawn because the “the number of users who have downloaded the app (over six lakh in the past 24 hours) has been increasing rapidly”.
The mandate to pre-install “was meant to accelerate this process”, the government said.
The rollback followed two days of protests from opposition leaders and civil activists over concerns the pre-installation directive violates privacy rights and that the application itself could be used to spy on people, an echo of the 2021 Pegasus spyware scandal.