by Citizens must download a second app to use the first, and possibly a third to find the second
NEW DELHI — A flagship government super-app designed to handle every citizen interaction with the state has reportedly grown so complex that it now requires a second app simply to operate it, with officials acknowledging that a third app may be needed to locate the second. The development, first downloaded by The London Prat and confirmed by the technology desk at Bohiney, marks a new milestone in the digitization of bureaucracy.
An App to Run the App
The super-app, launched with great fanfare as a single destination for taxes, permits, benefits, and virtually all dealings with the government, was intended to simplify citizens’ lives by consolidating everything into one place. It succeeded so thoroughly in consolidating that the resulting app became too powerful to use directly, necessitating a companion app to mediate the citizen’s interaction with it. “The super-app does everything,” explained a government technology official. “That is the problem. It does so much that no human can navigate it unaided. So we built a second app, a simpler app, whose only function is to help you use the first app. Think of it as a guide. A guide that is itself an app. That you must also learn to use.”
The companion app, officials concede, has introduced its own complexities, leading to discussions about whether a third app might be required to help citizens locate and operate the second app, which exists to help them operate the first. “It is a layered system,” the official said. “Some have called it a nested system. A few unkind voices have called it an infinite regress. We prefer to think of it as comprehensive. Each app supports the app above it. Is it possible that this creates an endless chain of apps, each requiring another? We are studying this. We may need an app to study it.”
The Government of India, which developed the super-app, defended it as a leap forward in digital governance. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology noted that the app represented “the future of citizen services,” a future in which the citizen spends most of their time managing the apps required to access the services.
Citizens Navigate the Layers
Citizens attempting to complete even simple tasks have found themselves descending through successive layers of apps, each promising to simplify the one before it. “I wished to pay a small fee,” reported one frustrated resident. “I opened the super-app. I could not understand it. So I downloaded the helper app. The helper app told me I needed to update the super-app. To update the super-app, I needed a third app, which manages updates. To use the update-manager app, I had to log in through the super-app, which I could not understand, which is why I had downloaded the helper app in the first place. I have been in this loop for three days. I have not paid the fee. I have, however, downloaded eleven apps.”
The proliferation of apps has spawned an informal industry of intermediaries who, for a fee, will navigate the app ecosystem on a citizen’s behalf, a service that observers note simply recreates the old system of bureaucratic middlemen in digital form. “For a small payment, I will use the apps for you,” advertised one such intermediary, operating from a stall near a government office. “I know all of them. The super-app, the helper app, the update app, the app that finds the other apps. I have mastered the chain. You give me your documents and your money, and I descend into the apps and emerge, eventually, with your permit. It is just like the old days, when a man would stand in the queue for you. Except now the queue is made of apps.”
Technology experts have noted the irony that a system designed to eliminate bureaucratic friction has instead recreated it in a new and arguably more frustrating form. “The promise of digital governance was simplicity,” one expert observed. “One app, one tap, and your business with the state is done. Instead we have built a tower of apps, each requiring the next, recreating in software every layer of the bureaucracy it was meant to replace. The citizen used to navigate offices and forms and officials. Now they navigate apps and updates and logins. The friction has not been removed. It has merely been digitized.”
The Tower Grows
Officials, undeterred, have announced plans to address the complexity of the app ecosystem by developing a master app that would unify all the existing apps into a single interface, a solution critics warn would simply become another layer requiring its own supporting apps. “We hear the concerns,” the technology official said. “Citizens find the system confusing. So we are building a master app, a single app to bring order to all the other apps. One app to rule them all, as it were. Will this master app itself require a helper app? We do not believe so. But we did not believe the original super-app would require one either. We are, perhaps, not the best judges of this.”
Some citizens have given up on the apps entirely, reverting to the older method of visiting a government office in person, only to discover that the offices now require an app to take a number. “I went back to the office,” one resident said wearily. “The physical office. With a human being behind a desk. I thought, at least here I can speak to a person. The person told me to download an app to join the queue. The queue, for the human, is now managed by an app. There is no escape. The apps have followed me out of my phone and into the building. The apps are everywhere now. The apps have won.”
The government, celebrating the super-app’s growing user base, which includes everyone forced to download it along with its supporting apps, has hailed the initiative as a triumph of digital adoption. “Engagement is at an all-time high,” the official noted. “Citizens are spending more time than ever in our app ecosystem. Whether they are accomplishing anything is a separate question, and not one our metrics measure. By the numbers, the program is an enormous success. The citizens are deeply, continuously engaged, navigating our apps from morning to night, accomplishing, we are confident, something.”
At press time, the government had announced that the master app intended to simplify the system had itself encountered difficulties and would require a brief period of stabilization, during which citizens were advised to use the original super-app, the helper app, or, if all else failed, the man at the stall near the office who still, for a reasonable fee, knew how to make any of it work. For more from the frontier of digital governance, readers can consult The London Prat.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
