TRAI’s Anti-Spam App is Not Available on App Store Anymore

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s DND 2.0 spam reporting app has been taken down from the Apple App Store. After months of fighting attempts by authorities to grant the app access to users’ entire message and phone logs, Apple created a workaround in 2018 that allowed the app to function without such bulk access. The app was the outcome of one of Apple’s most important legal battles with the regulator. Though the iOS version of the software was taken down from the App Store and TRAI’s website at some time between April and August of this year, Entrackr discovered. Who removed the app—Apple or TRAI—is not entirely clear. Apps that go three years without an update will be withdrawn from the App Store, Apple declared in April.

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Information Regarding the Removal of the App

According to an Entrackr report, DND 2.0 was created to address a problem that TRAI, particularly under the chairperson of RS Sharma, had been working diligently to address in 2017. In 2010, TRAI established a process for reporting SMS spam and implemented rules to guarantee that consumer complaints were addressed within a few days.

However, up until 2016, the only option to report spam was to manually send an SMS to a TRAI-designated short code, including the message’s text and the sender’s name or phone number. Since TRAI believed there should be a simpler method, it introduced the DND app. At that time, the software generated and sent the reporting SMS by automatically retrieving a user’s entire SMS inbox and call logs. Apple, however, considers this technique to be an unacceptable invasion of customer privacy and does not permit any developer to obtain consumers’ whole call or message logs for any reason. Sharma was incensed by the posture. In an interview, he argued that “no company can be allowed to be the guardian of a user’s data.”