Aadhaar card is the golden thread in the grand tapestry of Indian bureaucracy, where you tie every stray indication of people into a neat ball. It links you to your banking, gas connection, taxes, and mobile phone number. However, it did not get better from there, and carrying a physical card—a flimsy piece of laminated paper—felt like a dead weight for years. It can be misplaced, duplicated, or damaged. Enter the digital evolution. The new Aadhaar app, which the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) recently released in its complete avatar, is set to change the game from ‘carrying a card’ to ‘carrying an identity’.
This release is not just a repainting of a dated UI, but truly represents the first architectural change in citizen-state interaction in decades. Privacy, control and removing anything that hints at physical provenance have been zoomed into the crosshairs.
The QR Code Revolution
At the heart of the new App is an improved QR code-based verification system. Providing a photocopy of an Aadhaar card to a stranger had become the relay race of authentication, representing an individual security risk as millions of Aadhaar numbers were stored in unregulated filing cabinets across the country. The new App calls for a scan-and-verify model.
Visualise entering a hotel or an airport. Rather than passing your card to be copied, you display a dynamic QR code on your screen. Scanners scan; the data is checked by UIDAI instantaneously, with no physical data transfer. It is an encrypted handshake. The hotel has received confirmation that “yes, you are valid,” but your raw demographic data is not retained. This feature, by itself, would help seal one of the most significant privacy loopholes in the existing ecosystem.
Multi-Profile: The Family Vault
One more point of friction has historically been the management of family identities. Earlier, the App was single-user — one phone, one Aadhaar. However, in India, digital literacy is commonly limited to one or two members of the family. This new update comes with multi-profile support.
Holders of the App can now save the digital identities of their mother/father, husband/wife, and children in a single instance of the App.
By doing so, it creates a digital family vault inside the smartphone. This is especially important in rural areas, where only one smartphone is in the home. The UI has been reworked to allow easy switching between these profiles, with biometric locks or PINs in place to prevent misuse.
Privacy Controls at Your Fingertips
The most “power user” feature might be the ability to lock and unlock biometrics. So, we have all heard the horror stories about spoofing fingerprints. With the new App, you can use a kill switch yourself. Based on the default, you can keep the biometric data “Locked”. It works when you need to authenticate right—buying a SIM card, opening the App, and unlocking the biometrics for 10 minutes will allow you to complete the purchase, and then it will be locked again.
It freezes your identity, like when you go to a bank, and your card is blocked, until you choose to unfreeze it. Such a degree of granular control is a monumental leap towards digital sovereignty. As India speeds towards a fully digitised economy, tools like this are not just luxuries but essentials that give users control over their own data.
