India is making Aadhaar, the world's largest digital identity system, deeply ingrained in everyday life through a new app and offline verification support. The move raises new questions about security, consent, and the widespread use of large databases.
The changes, announced by India's government-backed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in late January, introduced a new Aadhaar app along with an offline verification framework, allowing individuals to prove their identity without real-time checks against a central Aadhaar database.
The app will allow users to share a limited amount of information, such as confirmation that they are over a certain age, rather than revealing their full date of birth, with a variety of services, from hotels and housing associations to workplaces, platforms and payment devices, but for now the existing maadhaar app will continue to work in parallel.
Alongside the new app, UIDAI is also expanding Aadhaar's footprint in mobile wallets, with upcoming integration with Google Wallet and discussions underway to enable similar functionality for Apple Wallet in addition to existing support for Samsung Wallet.
New Aadhaar app with selective data sharing Image credit: Google Play
Indian authorities are also promoting the use of the app in law enforcement and hospitality. The Ahmedabad City Crime Branch has become the first police force in India to integrate Aadhaar-based offline authentication with PATHIK, a guest monitoring platform launched by the police department to record visitor information for hotels and accommodation establishments.
UIDAI is also positioning the new Aadhaar app as a digital business card for meetings and networking, allowing users to share selected personal information via a QR code.
Officials at the launch in New Delhi said these latest efforts are part of a broader effort to replace photocopy and manual ID checks with consent-based offline authentication. This approach is intended to give users more control over the specific identity information they want to share, while also enabling verification at scale without having to consult Aadhaar's central database, they argued.
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Large-scale and early adoption
UIDAI officially launched the new Aadhaar app last month, but it has been in testing since early 2025. The app, which hit app stores towards the end of 2025, quickly overtook the older mAadhaar app in terms of monthly downloads, according to estimates from Appfigures.
Total monthly installs of Aadhaar-related apps increased from nearly 2 million in October to nearly 9 million in December.
The new app is layered on top of an identity system already in operation at scale given India's population. Since its launch, Aadhaar has issued more than 1.4 billion ID numbers and processed around 2.5 billion authenticated transactions every month, in addition to tens of billions of electronic “Know Your Customer” checks, according to figures published on UIDAI's public dashboard.
The move to offline verification does not replace this infrastructure, but rather extends it and moves Aadhaar from primarily a back-end verification tool to a more visible everyday interface.
At the launch of the app, UIDAI officials said the move towards offline verification is aimed at addressing long-standing risks associated with physical copies and screenshots of Aadhaar documents, which are often collected, stored and circulated largely unnoticed.
This expansion comes at a time of regulatory changes, easing of restrictions, and new frameworks (PDF) that have enabled UIDAI to enable some public and private organizations to verify Aadhaar credentials without querying a central database.
Consent, accountability and unresolved risks
Civil liberties and digital rights groups argue that these legal changes do not address Aadhaar's deeper structural risks.
Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international advisor and Asia-Pacific policy director at Access Now, said the expansion of Aadhaar offline and into the private sector poses new threats, especially at a time when India's data protection framework is still not in place.
Chima questioned the timing of the rollout, arguing that the federal government should have first waited for the Data Protection Commission of India to be established to allow for an independent review and broad consultation with affected communities.
“The fact that this is moving forward at this point seems to indicate an intention to continue expanding the use of Aadhaar, even if it is unclear in terms of the additional risks it may pose to the system and to Indians' data,” Chima told TechCrunch.
Indian legal advocacy groups also point to unresolved implementation failures.
Prasanth Sugathan, legal director at New Delhi-based digital rights organization SFLC.in, said UIDAI is positioning the app as a tool for citizen empowerment, but it does little to address deep-rooted issues such as inaccuracies in the Aadhaar database, security lapses and poor redress mechanisms that disproportionately impact vulnerable people.
He also referred to a 2022 report by the Auditor General of India that found UIDAI had not met certain compliance norms.
“Such issues can often lead to disenfranchisement of people, especially those who were supposed to benefit from such systems,” Sugathan told TechCrunch, adding that it remains unclear how data shared through new apps will be protected from breaches and leaks.
Campaigners behind Rethink Aadhaar, a civil society campaign focused on Aadhaar-related rights and accountability, argue that offline verification systems risk reintroducing the use of Aadhaar by the private sector in a way that the Supreme Court has already explicitly prohibited.
The group's Shruti Narayan and John Simte said allowing private entities to rely on Aadhaar for authentication on a daily basis amounts to “Aadhaar creep,” and said its use has become normalized across social and economic life despite a 2018 ruling that struck down a provision that allowed private entities to use Aadhaar to authenticate people's information. They warned that while India's data protection laws remain largely untested, consent in such situations is often illusory, especially in situations involving hotels, housing associations and delivery workers.
New apps, regulatory changes, and an expanding ecosystem are moving Aadhaar from a background identity utility to a visible layer of daily life that is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. As India ramps up its Aadhaar efforts, governments and technology companies are watching, drawn by the promise of population-wide identity verification.
India's IT Ministry and UIDAI CEO did not respond to requests for comment.