UIDAI mAadhaar app review: Several glitches, crashing biggest problem

The app, available on Google Play Store, is currently limited only for users of Android 5.0 and above

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)  has launched the mAadhaar app, a digital tool that allows holders of Aadhaar numbers to carry their in their smartphones. The app syncs all information available on your Aadhaar, such as demographic details, name, date of birth, gender, postal address and photograph, after you link your Aadhaar with the app. 

Now that is a convenient way to carry Aadhaar everywhere, all the time. The app also allows you to lock and unlock your biometric data -- a feature that was earlier possible only through the UIDAI web portal. 

For safety and security reasons, the mAadhaar app uses a two-layer authentication. The app has a Google Authenticator-like one-time password generation tool within the app for this purpose. The OTPs generated by the tool are read by the app automatically; there is no way to enter them manually.  

The app allows you to update your profile using the app, and the change reflects in the app once they are approved.  

Business Standard reviewed the app for its use and features and here are our observations:

The mAadhaar app is light, with a size of 10.80 Mb. There are multiple apps available with the same name, so you need to be careful and look for the mAadhaar app created by the Unique Identification Authority of India. 

UIDAI mAadhaar

Once downloaded, the app asks you to set a password before importing your the Aadhaar profile. Once the password is set, the app asks for your 16-digit Aadhaar number, which you can enter manually or by scanning the QR code on your Aadhaar card. However, the app seems to have a crashing problem. When we clicked on the verify button, it took us some time and patience to move to the next screen where the app sent the message for generation of an OTP, which the app retrieved automatically.  

Another drawback with the app is that there is no way to manually enter the OTP. You have to wait for the app to read it and process. The app crashes often and fails to connect to server, so the process of requesting OTP again and then waiting for the app to take the OTP without crashing is a tedious task.  

UIDAI mAadhaar

The app is a little difficult to use in its current form and requires a lot of work. The app needs to be checked closely by UIDAI for all its features before pushing out a revised version for final use.