What makes you think governments aren't involved? The article says:

> Apple’s mobile ID implementation supports the ISO 18013-5 mDL (mobile driver’s license) standard which Apple has played an active role in the development of

If you do a little casual googling, you will find references to the Australian government being involved in the development of that standard. You can also find proposals from the US Department of Homeland Security that refer to the standard.

Speaking of Google, Wikipedia says

> For example, Android's JetPack suite comes with specific support for ISO 18013–5 from version API 24.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_driver%27s_license

Does that qualify as device agnostic?

The wallet exists already as far as Apple is concerned.

I don't see a reason it can't be used with the government or that the government needs to make its own app.

Because of the political environment.

REAL ID only happened because of 9/11 (reactionaries are against it) and figured out how to use it to suppress voting. Individual states vary greatly in the US - there are people who don’t want people to have easy access to ID.

> Apple and not the government

I'm of the opinion that Apple is a defacto arm (back channel) of the government now based on recent developments.

Im not super fond of the idea of having a brand lock-in to make it easier to work with the governments. This feels a bit like a world where Turbotax was the only game in town for softwares to file taxes. So you'd have either the manual way, or Intuit and that's it.

This isn't as bad, and I didn't look much into it so maybe there's stuff I don't know that lessens the negative, but seeing it being Apple specific doesn't make me feel so good.