Rediff.com India Limited has announced the launch of the Rediff News application for Android hand-held devices. Rediff.com’s Android news app can be downloaded from Google Play by visiting
rediff.com/newsapp on mobile phones and tablets running on the Android OS.
The app offers readers access to a collection of the latest stories across Rediff’s News, Business, Movies, Sports, and Get Ahead sections, in a tiled interface and comes with an option to enable or disable images, and an offline mode to read all the content.
Article Interface: One can tap on any specific tile to view the respective story. We noticed that the app only provides an excerpt for the story with a link to read the full article. Tapping on the link opens the article in an in-app browser, allowing one to read the article and view slideshows (if any). Since this is an official Rediff app, we believe Rediff should’ve removed the additional step to access an article and rendered the full article within the app itself. Rediff should focus on delivering a good app experience rather than looking to garner extra pageviews.
Sharing of Articles: We quite liked the fact that the app allowed us to share articles through Android’s default
share intent option, since it will enable users to share any specific article through various apps installed on their Android phones, rather than sticking to a specific sharing mechanism.
Besides this, there is a small refresh button at the top and a small gears icon which opens the setting menu to offer various customization options like the ability to turn off image downloading to reduce data usage, and play a sound alert for every update notification, although there is currently no option to customize the sound alert. The app also allows one to set a specific refresh time (1hr, 3 hrs, 6 hrs, Daily, Manual) for the app, although we were glad that the app was set to manual refresh by default.
