India is pushing Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital identity system, deeper into everyday private life with a new app and support for offline verification, a move that raises new questions about security, consent and wider use of the massive database.
The changes, announced in late January by India’s government-backed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), introduce a new Aadhaar application along with an offline authentication framework that allows individuals to prove their identity without real-time checks against a central Aadhaar database.
The app allows users to share a limited amount of information, such as confirming that they are over a certain age, rather than revealing their full date of birth, with a range of services such as hotels and accommodation companies across workplaces, platforms and payment devices, while the existing mAadhaar app works in parallel for now.
Along with the new app, UIDAI is also expanding Aadhaar’s presence in mobile wallets with an upcoming integration with Google Wallet and discussions are underway to enable similar features in Apple Wallet, in addition to the existing support in Samsung Wallet.
The Indian Authority is also promoting the use of the app in policing and hospitality. Ahmedabad City Crime Branch has become the first police unit in India to integrate offline Aadhaar-based authentication with PATHIK, a guest monitoring platform launched by the police department targeting hotels and guest accommodation to record visitor information.
UIDAI has also positioned the new Aadhaar app as a digital business card for meetings and networking that allows users to share select personal details through a QR code.
Officials at the launch in New Delhi said these latest efforts are part of a broader effort to replace photocopies and manual ID checks with offline consent-based verification. The approach, they argued, is intended to give users more control over which specific identity information they want to share, while enabling large-scale authentication without having to search the central Aadhaar database.
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Timely expansion on a mass scale
While UIDAI formally launched the new Aadhaar app last month, it has been in testing since early 2025. Estimates from Appfigures show that the app, which hit app stores in late 2025, quickly overtook the older mAadhaar app in monthly downloads.
Combined monthly installs of Aadhaar-linked apps rose from nearly 2 million in October to nearly 9 million in December.
The new app is layered on top of an identity system that is already working on a massive scale with the Indian population in mind. Figures released on the UIDAI’s public dashboard show that Aadhaar has issued more than 1.4 billion identification numbers and processes roughly 2.5 billion verification transactions every month, along with tens of billions of electronic “know your customer” checks since its launch.
The move towards offline authentication does not replace this infrastructure so much as augment it, moving Aadhaar from a largely backend authentication tool to a more visible and everyday interface.
At the launch of the app, UIDAI officials said the move to offline verification was intended to address long-term risks associated with physical photocopies and screenshots of Aadhaar documents, which were often collected, stored and distributed with little oversight.
The expansion comes at a time of regulatory changes, loosening of restrictions and a new framework (PDF), with the UIDAI now allowing some public and private organizations to verify Aadhaar credentials without querying a central database.
Consent, Liability and Unresolved Risks
Civil liberties and digital rights groups say these legal changes do not address Aadhaar’s deeper structural risks.
Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international lawyer and Asia Pacific director of policy at Access Now, said the expansion of Aadhaar into the offline and private sector environment poses new threats, especially as India’s data protection framework is still being rolled out.
Chima questioned the timing of the rollout, arguing that the federal government should have first waited for the Data Protection Board of India to be set up and allow for an independent review and wider consultation with affected communities.
“The fact that this has happened at this point seems to favor continuing to expand the use of Aadhaar, although it’s not clear in terms of the additional risks it could pose to the system, as well as to Indians’ data,” Chima told TechCrunch.
Indian legal groups also point to unresolved implementation flaws.
Prasanth Sugathan, legal director of the New Delhi-based digital rights group SFLC.in, said that while the UIDAI created the app as a citizen empowerment tool, it does not address persistent problems such as inaccuracies in the Aadhaar database, security lapses and poor redress mechanisms that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations.
He also cited a 2022 Comptroller and Auditor General of India report that found that the UIDAI had failed to meet certain compliance standards.
“Such issues can often disenfranchise people, especially those who should have benefited from such systems,” Sugathan told TechCrunch, adding that it remains unclear how the data shared through the new app would prevent breaches or leaks.
Activists associated with Rethink Aadhaar, a civil society campaign focused on Aadhaar-related rights and responsibilities, say the offline verification system risks reintroducing Aadhaar in the private sector in ways that the Supreme Court has already expressly prohibited.
The group’s Shruti Narayan and John Simte said that allowing private entities to routinely rely on Aadhaar for authentication amounts to “Aadhaar creep”, normalizing its use across social and economic life despite a 2018 judgment that struck down provisions allowing private entities to use Aadhaar to verify people’s information. They warned that consent in such contexts is often illusory, especially in situations involving hotels, accommodation companies or delivery drivers, while India’s data protection law remains largely untested.
Together, the new app, regulatory changes and expanding ecosystem are moving Aadhaar from a background identity tool to a visible layer of everyday life that is increasingly difficult to avoid. As India doubles down on Aadhaar, governments and tech companies are watching closely, drawn by the promise of population-scale identity control.
India’s IT ministry and UIDAI director general did not respond to requests for comment.