The Ministry of Construction intends to increase the number of downloads of the “State Services Home” application by more than five times by 2024

The Ministry of Construction intends to increase the number of downloads of the State Services House application by more than five times by 2024. The application already lags behind in popularity only the main superapp “Gosuslugi”. However, there are a large number of private mobile applications of management companies on the market that already aggregate the necessary data, and market participants do not yet consider the government application convenient. In addition, such products are at risk of being removed from mobile stores due to sanctions, experts emphasize.

Kommersant got acquainted with the new version of the passport of the digital transformation program of the Ministry of Construction. It describes the target indicators for downloads of the Gosuslugi Dom mobile application (intended for homeowners in apartment buildings, integrated with the GIS housing and communal services, where all management and resource supply organizations enter data on residential real estate). The Ministry of Construction, according to the document, expects to significantly increase the number of installations of the application: from 2.3 million in 2023 to 12.4 million in 2024.

The passport also sets other targets – in particular, the “maximum number of app users in one day.” In 2023 it amounted to 314 thousand, in 2024 it should reach 400 thousand.

“Gosuslugi Dom” is developed and published by Information System Operator JSC (operator of GIS Housing and Communal Services, in 2022 it was a joint venture of Russian Post and Inter RAO, now the owners are not disclosed). The app was first published on Google Play in April 2022, and has since been downloaded more than 1 million times, according to the store. The App Store does not publish such data. According to data.ai, “Gosuslugi Dom” is the second most popular public services application in the Russian segments of the App Store and Google Play. Based on the results of April 5–11, “Gosuslugi” is in 13th place in the overall ranking, “Gosuslugi Dom” is in 65th place, “Gosuslugi Auto” is in 225th place.

The Ministry of Digital Development and the Ministry of Construction told Kommersant that they are jointly developing the “State Services House” and expect to achieve planned targets in 2024 by “informing citizens.” But there are no plans to include “Gosuslugi Dom” in the list of required pre-installations.

To achieve the goals of popularizing the application “with real market marketing means, the Ministry of Construction can also rely on its promotion on other government resources,” says Pavel Golub, co-founder of the digital platform development company Arcsinus. However, the number of installations in itself cannot be a metric of the popularity of the service, he believes: “Not all people who download the application become active users.”

At the same time, the market for mobile applications working in the field of home management is already quite competitive. “Many large management companies make their own applications for paying for housing and communal services, issue receipts through them, because it is more convenient to control payments and collect them directly for maintenance and repairs,” notes the president of the Association of Real Estate Service Companies (which unites more than 1 thousand management companies and HOA) Nikita Chulochnikov.

The desire of regulators to gather an audience in government applications may lead to an outflow of users from already created commercial applications. Even though the GIS Housing and Communal Services and Gosuslugi Dom have confusing, inconvenient, cumbersome functionality, says Mr. Chulochnikov.

The popularity of Gosuslugi Dom will depend on whether its operator will be able to combine in one service interaction with all organizations related to the household at once, says TelecomDaily CEO Denis Kuskov. To do this, the Ministry of Construction needs to develop uniform requirements for the volume of data, its format, and interaction between different systems. Then the government application will be able to compete with existing ones, and not just duplicate their functionality.

At the same time, “all services that are clearly associated with the state are now at greater risk of being withdrawn from application stores than private ones,” the expert emphasizes. Government applications have already been removed from Google Play. In 2023, this happened with Moscow State Services and other Moscow municipal applications. This happened after the Moscow Information Technology Department was included in the EU sanctions list.

Yuri Litvinenko, Tatiana Isakova