ArchiveFAQs
Questions about a product that is no longer running.
What CowinSlotNotifier did, what it collected, and why it stopped.
- Operating
- 2021 — 2022
- Status
- Retired
- Platforms
- Android + iOS
- 01
- No. The service was retired at the end of 2022 and the applications were withdrawn from both stores. This site is an archive of the product as it existed between 2021 and 2022.
- 02
- No. CowinSlotNotifier was an independent, third-party application built by BitInfinity. It read vaccination availability from the Government of India's publicly available CoWIN APIs. It was not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Government of India, and CoWIN remained the only place to book an appointment.
- 03
- A person chose what they were looking for — a vaccine, an age group, a dose, a fee type, and a center, district or PIN code. The backend monitored availability through the public CoWIN API and evaluated it against those stored preferences. When availability matched, a push notification was sent to that device.
- 04
- No. Booking always happened on the official CoWIN platform. The app told a person that a matching slot existed and pointed them there.
- 05
- A device identifier and a push registration token — the minimum needed to deliver a notification to the correct device. There were no accounts, and no names or email addresses were collected for notification delivery. This is set out in the app's privacy policy as published in July 2022.
- 06
- The product existed to solve one problem: vaccination slots were scarce and disappeared quickly. As India's vaccination programme progressed, slots stopped being scarce and the problem resolved itself. Rather than keep a service running past its purpose, it was retired at the end of 2022.
- 07
- The service stopped operating at the end of 2022, and the device identifiers and push tokens it held ceased to be used for any purpose. No personal profiles were ever built, because none were ever collected.
- 08
- No. The Android and iOS applications are no longer published, and no build is distributed from this site. The app depended on live CoWIN endpoints and a running backend, neither of which it uses any more.
Is CowinSlotNotifier still available?
Was this an official Government of India application?
How did the slot notifications work?
Could the app book a vaccination appointment?
What information did the app collect?
Why was the service retired?
What happened to user data after the shutdown?
Can I still download the app?
Something not covered here? Get in touch, or read the archived privacy policy.
This archive lives at cowinslotnotifier.bitinfinity.org.