India Cancels Plan to Place Biometric App on Smartphones

India has reportedly abandoned plans to require smartphone makers to include the country’s biometric ID app on their devices.

The move came in the face of opposition from companies such as Apple and Samsung, Reuters reported Friday (April 17).

UIDAI (Unique Identity Authority of India), the government body that operates the Aadhaar app, had asked India’s IT ministry in January to convince the tech giants to preinstall the service.

As Reuters noted, Aadhaar is a unique 12-digit identity number tied to a person’s fingerprints and iris scans, and is used by close to 1.34 billion residents for verification in banking and telecom services, along with quicker entry at airports.

India’s IT ministry examined the proposal and “is not in favor of mandating the pre-installation of the Aadhaar App on smartphones,” UIDAI said in a statement to Reuters on Friday.

The statement added that the ministry had held a “consultation with stakeholders from the electronics industry” before deciding to drop the Aadhaar preloading idea.

According to documents reviewed by Reuters, the smartphone companies had been uneasy about device security and compatibility related to the Aadhaar proposal, while also expressing concerns about the higher cost of manufacturing a separate line of devices just for India.

The news follows reports from last year that India was introducing biometric authentication to its national domestic payments network, the United Payments Interface (UPI).

Under this system, UPI users can approve payments with facial recognition and fingerprints, with authentications will be carried out using biometric data stored on Aadhaar.

PYMNTS has catalogued the popularity of biometric authentication in other parts of the globe. For instance, research from the 2025 “Global Digital Shopping Index: UAE Edition” found that 32% of shoppers in the United Arab Emirates had used biometric authentication such as fingerprint or facial recognition technology to complete their most recent online transaction.

This number is close to double the global average rate of 18.5% and represents the second-highest level seen across all countries surveyed by PYMNTS Intelligence.

“This high rate of adoption underscores a strong consumer preference for convenient yet secure methods of verifying purchases,” PYMNTS wrote last summer.

“For financial institutions and payment processors, this signals a clear imperative: supporting and enhancing biometric payment solutions is no longer a niche offering but a mainstream expectation among UAE consumers.”