Don’t Count Portals—Count Installs

This post summarizes the research we presented at the start of the April 15, 2025 edition of FWD50. It’s imprecise, because there’s limited data on government apps. A modern app product tracks daily and monthly active users (DAU/MAU) as well as downloads and installs. But perfect is often the enemy of good enough, so this is our best effort at initial data.

The many ways to measure Digital Government (and what’s wrong with them)

Governments love metrics. We hear about how many citizens have digital ID cards, how many services are online, the latest AI strategy published, or the sheer count of digital services offered. While impressive—X million digital IDs issued, Y% services available online, Z chatbots launched—they often measure the supply side of digital government. 

In other words, they tell us what government has built, rather than what people actually use. And digital government isn’t just building.

It’s about adoption. And these days, digital adoption means apps.

Government in Your Pocket

Imagine a single number that tells you, at a glance, how deeply digital government has penetrated everyday life. A metric that reflects both the government’s ability to deliver useful digital services and a citizen’s willingness to use them.

Here’s a deceptively simple one: How many people install a multi-function government app on their phone?

Smartphones are our foothold into the digital world. They’re where we bank, communicate, shop, and scroll. If “government” is truly part of people’s digital lives, it should be on that device alongside other must-have apps. App installation and usage connects supply to demand.

Downloading your country’s all-in-one government app is voting with your fingertips. It means your government built something valuable and that you get value from it. It shows both:

• The capacity to deliver service. After all, it’s hard to build and support a multi-service app, from policymakers getting buy-in to technical teams implementing continuous delivery to product management and user testing.

• The uptake of the service. If people find it useful and better than paper or web-centric alternatives, then they’ll recognize that government is valuable to them.

This simple metric shifts focus from digital government on paper to digital government in practice–literally in people’s pockets.

Too blunt?

Sure. But sometimes it takes a blunt instrument to produce meaningful change.

There are plenty of flaws in comparing jurisdictions according to app adoption. For one thing, not every country has a single, unified app. What’s more, downloads don’t measure active users. But adoption forces governments to ask: despite all our strategies and portals, did we make something so useful that millions choose to install it? Maybe that’s a worthwhile wake-up call for any government that equates launching a service with succeeding at digital government.

What does ‘Multi-Function’ mean?

Here, we mean a national, cross-departmental, multi-service app. An app that combines multiple major services (such as personal identification, taxes, healthcare, benefits, licenses, permits, fines, voting or other government functions in a single interface with a single login.

An app that only handles one narrow function (such as paying for parking, or a city bus schedule) doesn’t count. Those don’t really “test digital capability” beyond a single department, because cross-functional apps require inter-departmental cooperation behind the scenes, which is a clear sign of digital maturity. We care about apps that are a digital front door to all government services, even if that door’s only starting to open.

Take Brazil as a case in point. The Brazilian government’s gov.br app is a unified portal to countless federal services. A citizen can access tax information, apply for benefits, check health records, renew licenses, and more, all in one place. As of 2021, about half of all Brazilians–over 100 million people–had an account on the gov.br app. Clearly, this qualifies as an adopted digital government app.

Another example: Ukraine’s Diia app. The stated goal of the app was to put “the state in a smartphone.” It now offers over 100 services, not just digital passports, driver’s licenses, business registration and tax filing, but also more mundane things like address changes and showing your ID at a bar. The app, built under impossibly harsh conditions, is now being actively exported to other countries.

Building an adoption list

To come up with a preliminary table of adoption, we looked at many different sources. We checked app stores, government open data portals, press releases, and even ministerial speeches. In some countries, the Google Play Store or Apple App Store show download figures, but we considered statements from official channels or credible media more useful.

We then paired these numbers with total population figures to get a rough adoption percentage. Yes, it’s an estimate, but it’s consistent across countries, and that’s what makes it useful for comparison. Canada, for example, doesn’t report app usage widely. But Ukraine and Brazil do. So we made the most of what we had.

Here’s what we found. If you have better data, we’d love to update this.

Here’s a chart of that data:

Some takeaways

There’s a big difference between a country saying it's digital, and a citizen feeling like it is. The countries at the top of this list are the usual darlings of public sector modernization—Estonia, The Netherlands, Singapore, and so on—didn’t just build tech. They changed habits. They removed friction. And they earned trust.

The countries that did less well tended to be larger (though India, China, and Brazil have made great progress; China’s not on this list largely because its services are delivered through WeChat, a social platform.) They also tend to be federations and republics where jurisdiction for day-to-day tasks like driving and healthcare is split between nation and state/province. And they tend to rely on the private sector for many functions, particularly medicine and taxation.

The real test

Here’s the ultimate question every public servant and policymaker needs to ask themselves: If someone moved to your country tomorrow, would they have your government on their phone by the end of the week?

If the answer is no, you’re not a digital government.