I am happy to see that the Government of Mauritius has a mobile application for Android devices. It is named Mauritius Gov. However this app is developed and published by a company named LINK Development¹ and not by the Ministry of ICT or the National Computer Board. LINK Development is not registered in Mauritius. It is a foreign company. Thus, its operations fall outside our country’s jurisdiction.

Mauritius Gov resides on Google Play Store under LINK Development’s account. Therefore the application can be remotely controlled, modified, updated by LINK Development.

If the application isn’t controlled by a Government body, then is it ethical or legally correct for a private non-Mauritian company to use the name Mauritius and the Mauritius coat of arms as the logo?

In the application details section, the developer name & email belong to LINK Development.

I installed Mauritius Gov to test it. The application takes 2.66MB of space on my mobile. The icon used is the Mauritius coat of arms.

Mauritius Gov loads a screen with six buttons that lead to different sections of the application. These point to services that are currently available on the Government Web Portal.

I clicked on the "CONTACT US" button. It's a broken link, displaying "Web page not available".

Clicking on the E-Services button, it opens a list of sub-categories linking to PDF forms rather than online services.

Conclusion

Mauritius Gov for the Android device is not a modern and real mobile application per se. It is only a static front-end that links to existing PDF forms and RSS² feeds from the Government Web Portal. I support the idea of having a mobile application for Government E-Services but this one needs a lot of improvement.

Security-wise I would not recommend using the application until it is hosted through an account managed by the Ministry of ICT.

[2] RSS, often called Really Simple Syndication (as from version 2.0) is a standard for the syndication of web content.