Will Apple Resist India’s Order To Install Govt. App That Cannot Be Deleted?

India-West News Desk

BENGALURU – Apple is once again at the center of a regulatory storm in India after the telecoms ministry quietly issued an order requiring all smartphone makers to preload a government cyber security app that cannot be deleted.

The directive mandates that the state-owned Sanchar Saathi app be installed on every new device sold in India within 90 days. For phones already in the supply chain, companies must push the app through a software update. The order was sent privately to select manufacturers and has not been publicly released.

For most device makers, including Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo, the requirement is likely to be inconvenient but manageable. For Apple, it strikes directly at long-standing internal policies that prohibit pre-installation of any third-party or government app on iPhones before sale.

Apple has previously clashed with Indian regulators over a government anti-spam app, resisting attempts to force deeper access into its operating system. The new mandate could reopen that battle at a time when India is one of Apple’s fastest-growing markets. It is also a key manufacturing hub that India needs and wooed the company furiously to come in.

The government frames Sanchar Saathi as a public-safety tool. The app allows users to block lost or stolen phones through a central equipment registry, identify devices using forged or duplicate numbers, and detect fraudulent mobile connections. Officials say it has already been downloaded over five million times, helped block more than 3.7 million stolen or lost phones, and led to the termination of over 30 million fraudulent connections.

But the requirement that the app be undeletable has alarmed privacy advocates, who point to Russia’s recent mandate forcing phones to ship with a state-backed messenger app called MAX. Critics argue that such measures create a precedent for governments to embed their own software deep into consumer devices under the banner of safety.

For Apple, the order raises both technical and philosophical challenges: the company would need to rework its tightly controlled setup process, and doing so could be perceived as compromising on its widely advertised privacy commitments.