Indus OS, the widely regarded Android-based Indian operating system has partnered with Delta ID, a pioneer in the mobile authentication space and announced the Aadhaar-authenticated OS in India. Both the companies have been working on the OS from the last six months. The OS uses IRIS-biometric technology to provide secure identification for the users.
The newly announced OS supports 12 Indian languages. Both the companies are looking to roll out the OS to the general public in this quarter and empower the one billion Indians who are enrolled for Aadhar. The companies are also expecting Indians to use their Aadhaar for identification and authentication of various services such as Govt. subsidies and payment wallets.
Commenting on the partnership, Rakesh Deshmukh, Co-founder, and CEO of Indus OS said, “One of our focus areas in 2017 is to build features and innovations to support Govt. initiatives, especially Aadhaar-enabled services. We look forward to our partnership with Delta ID, the market leaders in IRIS based authentication technology, and expect to release the first Aadhaar-authenticated OS this quarter. This OS will be released across our smartphone brand partners, and we foresee 100 million users to be using the Aadhaar-authenticated OS by 2020.”
Undoubtedly, Aadhaar has a massive reach to the audience across the country with over one billion Indians enrolled already. The companies think that the smartphone adoption is rapidly growing and with India being one of the largest markets in the world, the roll out of first-ever Aadhaar-authenticated OS may help them to drive mass adoption of Government to citizen services and initiatives.
Indus OS has already partnered with six domestic brands namely Micromax, Intex, Karbonn, Celkon, and Swipe. All these brands will integrate the OS first on their phones when it releases. The OS will also have the ability to secure financial transactions via the IRIS technology, thereby pushing the adoption of digitally enabled financial services. Indus OS expects over 100 million users of the Aadhaar authenticated OS in the next three years.
So, how does the new OS work? Firstly, the software and hardware combination will capture the IRIS ID information through a dedicated IRIS scanning camera built into the smartphone. Secondly, the OS encodes this information and then encrypts it with UID’s public key. Thirdly, the encrypted information will be sent to the UIDAI server for a match, and the UIDAI server responds with a token ‘Yes’ or ‘No.' Finally, if the token is ‘Yes,' the consumer will be eligible to utilise Aadhaar ID for a whole suite of activities.
