The app, which is called "Smart Pakem," was created by Jakarta's Prosecutor's Office. It was launched Sunday in the Google Play store, according to the Bangkok Post. However, searches for the app in the Indonesian and US Google Play stores do not currently yield any results.
Users of the app can report any people or groups that do not follow the canonical views of Indonesia's six officially recognized religions: Islam, Hinduism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Confucianism and Buddhism. The purpose of the app, according to the Prosecutor's Office, is to enhance the current heresy reporting process.
In addition, the app features a list of religious edicts and blacklisted organizations so users can more easily file complaints, instead of going through the lengthier process of sending a written complaint to the Prosecutor's Office.
"The objective… is to provide easier access to information about the spread of beliefs in Indonesia, to educate the public and to prevent them from following doctrines from an individual or a group that are not in line with the regulations," Nirwan Nawawi, a spokesperson for the Prosecutor's Office, told AFP in a recent statement.
However, human rights groups are concerned that the app could lead to discrimination against religious minorities in the Southeast Asian country, where people of non-recognized faiths have long suffered persecution.
"This is going from bad to worse — another dangerous step to discriminate [against] religious minorities in Indonesia," Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono recently told AFP.
Earlier this year, a mob destroyed the homes of a small community of the Ahmadiyya Islamic minority in Lombok, an Indonesian island east of Bali and west of Sumbawa, after the Indonesian Ulema Council — the country's Muslim clerical body — deemed the sect heretical, the Bangkok Post reported.
This summer, an ethnic Chinese Buddhist living in North Sumatra was sentenced to 18 months in prison for blasphemy for complaining that the Muslim call to prayer from her neighborhood mosque, repeated five times a day, was too loud, Reuters reported at the time.