A government app that grew without being compulsory
In early October 2026, the French state announced that the France Identité app had passed 5 million users, two years after it opened to the public. The government's own account of that growth is about use cases, not obligations. Identity and ticket checks now work aboard TGV INOUI, Intercités, OUIGO and reserved-seat TER trains, where the page reports over one million users. Since this summer the app can also be shown at bag drop or boarding at French airports, though not at border control. Other uses include FranceConnect logins, single-use identity proofs, online proxy voting for certified identities, and the digital driving licence.
The official page does not call the app voluntary, but nothing in the rollout forces anyone onto it. The service-public.gouv.fr guidance on rail use presents it as an option: if you have it, you can show it instead of a paper ticket and ID. Users must be over 18, hold a card-format identity card, and activate the feature themselves.
This matters because the usual way to get a government app to scale is to make it the only door to a service. France has not done that here.
The strongest case for a mandate
The best argument for compulsion is that digital identity is infrastructure, and infrastructure has network effects. Services will not build for an app that few people carry. A voluntary scheme can stall at a few million users, leaving the state to run two parallel systems, paper and digital, indefinitely. Franceinfo reported in February 2026 that adoption was struggling at 3.6 million users. At that point only the SNCF and law enforcement accepted it as valid proof, and interviewees cited low awareness, generational unease and fear of losing a phone. A mandate would have fixed the cold-start problem faster.
That argument has real force. But the numbers since then point the other way. Between February and October the user count rose from 3.6 million to over 5 million, a gain of roughly 1.4 million in about eight months. The growth followed the addition of airports and the extension of rail coverage, not a legal requirement. Each new place the app works gives a person a reason to install it.
Why usefulness is the better adoption engine
Voluntary adoption does several things a mandate cannot.
First, it disciplines the product. If the app is slow, unreliable, or intrusive, people stop using it, and the agency has to fix it. A mandated app can be mediocre without consequence.
Second, it keeps the privacy trade-off in the user's hands. The agency stresses that single-use proofs share only what a procedure needs, with no photocopy of the card. That design is easier to defend when people can decline it. A police union spokesperson quoted by franceinfo noted that the encoding stays on the phone, not in an online database. That is a design choice worth preserving.
Third, it avoids the exclusion problem. The app needs a recent smartphone and a card-format ID, and it excludes minors. A rule that made it the only way to board a train or flight would shut out people without either. Because paper still works, the digital option stays an addition.
The two pressures ahead
The first is age verification. On 14 August 2026 the Constitutional Council struck down the under-15 social media ban. It held the ban was not adapted, necessary and proportionate to freedom of expression and communication. It also found that Parliament had not set the conditions and limits of age verification, so the legal safeguards for privacy were missing. The Council accepted that protecting children is a legitimate aim. It faulted the method.
That ruling is a warning for anyone planning to make France Identité the default age gate. If every social media sign-up required a state identity app, a voluntary tool would become a de facto condition of speaking online. The Council's reasoning on privacy safeguards and proportionality would apply directly. A better design lets a user prove only that they are above an age threshold, with no identity disclosed, and offers alternatives that do not require the state app. Age proof should be one option on the menu, not the only way in.
The second is the EU wallet. Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, the eIDAS 2 framework, requires member states to make a digital identity wallet available. Each state has 24 months from the adoption of the implementing acts, which puts the deadline around the end of 2026. The same article makes clear that individuals choose whether to use the wallet and are not required to. The regulation therefore sets the same voluntary principle France has been following. France Identité describes itself as the only digital identity able to be certified at the highest European level of assurance. That claim will be tested as the wallet requirements settle.
What regulators should do
The French experience suggests a short list of guardrails.
- Keep a non-digital path for every service the app unlocks, so that adoption stays a matter of convenience.
- Legislate the age-verification limits the Constitutional Council said were missing, before any rewritten under-15 law relies on the app.
- Require selective disclosure, so that proving an age or a ticket never reveals a name, address or full identity.
- Publish adoption and failure data for each use case, so claims of success can be checked against what people actually do.
A government identity app that grows on its own merits is rarer than it should be. The sensible response is to protect the conditions that made the growth possible, not to remove them the moment the numbers look good enough to justify a mandate.