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With the vision of accelerating delivery of e-services as envisaged under NeGP and optimizing ICT spending of the government, the Government of India has launched the initiative of establishing the e-Gov AppStore. The e-Gov AppStore is a national level common repository of customizable and configurable applications, components and web services that can be re-used by various government agencies/departments at Centre and States, which will include the setting up of a common platform to host and run applications (developed by government agencies or private players) at National Clouds.
Following are the objectives for setting up the e-Gov AppStore:
- To speed up the development and deployment of e-Gov applications
- To replicate successful applications across the States in an easy manner
- To avoid duplication of effort and cost in development of similar application
- To ensure availability of certified applications following common standards at one place
e-Gov AppStore has features which allows private agencies including SMEs to provide details of their good applications which may be adopted by states/departments after due trials. Application developers for the public sector will be able to promote successful applications for replications across interested states/departments. Additionally, it provides opportunity to private players to showcase products relevant to public sector in delivering citizen centric services. Interested users may provide feedback on the products developed by the private sector for enhancement /additional features for adoption by willing states/departments. Further, public and private sector agencies may share concepts, ideas and requirements on applications which would aide public service delivery.
Core and common applications that have high demand and are replicable across the central and state levels are likely to be included in e-Gov AppStore, which shall be hosted on the National Cloud. Common components like the payment gateway, messaging platform, MIS reporting, etc, will also be made available in the e-Gov AppStore. Any department can use the services of e-Gov AppStore through two primary means – either by directly running an application available in the respective e-Gov AppStore or by downloading an application from the respective e-Gov AppStore.
Presently, the e-Gov AppStore is primarily a repository showcasing NIC applications and components which were developed for specific requirement of States. These applications are not yet in their productized form. Going ahead, some of the popular applications will be productized and made available on the e-Gov AppStore to be used as SaaS.
The e-Gov AppStore has the following features:
- Allows sharing of applications
- Allows search for applications
- Provides basic information about an application on selection
- Allows users to review an application, provide feedback and rate an application
- For contributing applications, there is three level approval process for government applications and two level approval process for private applications
- Allows authenticated (privileged) users to download application for consumption. An authenticated user is one who is registered with AppStore portal and have a user ID and password to login.
The e-Gov AppStore will be implemented in a phased manner over a period of time. In due course, a complete eco-system will be established (including mechanism for funding, charge back, contract management, SLAs) and will become a part of the GI Cloud initiative under Government of India.