Changes in CoWin app, govt restricts vaccine slot info to fight bots and alert services

The government of India has put a restriction on the number of API calls that such third-party source codes can make to avail real-time information on vaccine availability.

The government of India has put a restriction for third parties on the access to real-time data on vaccine slots across the country. The move comes as several new portals make use of this data to notify users of vaccine slot availability. As people in India race to book a slot for the Covid-19 vaccine, several websites have come up lately that promise to help them with the same. These websites make use of the Application Programming Interface (APIs) of the CoWin portal to source the data for vaccine availability in a region.