DD News Android app lands in Google Play & it is awful

Prasar Bharati has released the official Android application of the terrestrial TV news channel DD News (Doordarshan News) in the Google Play. The app is now available to download for free and offers live-streaming of the channel broadcast, videos of the channel programming and news items.

Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting Arun Jaitley on Thursday unveiled the app at a press event in the Indian capital. He was accompanied by former Olympian and current Minister of State or Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore.

Jaitley said at the event that the launch of the application by DD News was an important milestone for Prasar Bharati as it catered to the information needs of the pan-Indian audience.

Although introduced with much fanfare, the DD News application is terrible and none of its three main features work decently. During our testing, the live-streaming didn’t work even on Wi-Fi. The older videos did play fine most of the times, however their titles seem to be the file-names rather than readable headlines.The text-based news items are not a part of the native app and when you click on a news link, the app opens that news item from the desktop version of the DD News website in Android webview.

We hope that Prasar Bharati fixes the problems in the future versions, but we won’t hold our breath for it.