Rediff News app for Android OS launched

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.

Rediff News app for Android OS launched

“With all that’s going on in India and the world, it’s easy to miss the stories and events that impact our daily lives. The release of the Rediff News app is designed to keep our users consistently informed and engaged with the current headlines and happenings – across business, technology, entertainment, and sports – in an innovative and simple way,” said Ajit Balakrishnan, Rediff.com India Ltd. Chairman and CEO.

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In addition, the news app provides a shortened version of reports, with a link back to Rediff.com’s mobile site where the full report can be read. Readers can also share and comment on their favourite, newsworthy items via Facebook and Twitter, and via Whatsapp, SMS and email.

The application also has the option to refresh manually or automatically every 3 hours, 6 hours or once a day, allowing the user to personalise settings, and receive stories they are interested in when they want.

Mr. Balakrishnan continued, “Each and every platform enhancement is directly tied toRediff’s commitment to making our users’ online news experience richer and more beneficial. With this latest innovation, the most up-to-date and relevant news stories from India and around the globe are now at readers’ fingertips – instantly, when they want it. We believe the Rediff News app offering further strengthens our market leadership in leveraging cutting-edge technology to open even greater online opportunities for our customers, while creating and expanding channels to grow the Rediff business and brand.”

In December, last year, Rediff introduced a news search service, called Realtime News Search. The service aimed to bring, as Rediff put it, ‘India As It Happens’. An official statement from the company stated that the service would deliver real-time, high performance search for results pertaining to news, events and people. Rediff claimed that on Realtime News Search news is collected “within minutes of the actual news event taking place and results returned within milliseconds of a user query”. 

Interestingly, Rediff claims that the ‘Realtime’ facet of their news service prompts an instant search experience, which translates to the fact that the news service throws results as you type and as the news happens. The news content that is provided on the news service, states Rediff is sourced from around 35,000 news sites and Rediff articles from 2002. Both, global and national news are covered. In addition to the written content, Rediff claims that users will also be able to view about 9 million images from Indian and international sites.

In addition to this, the news search will contain images of Bollywood events, sports celebrities “directly from the photographers covering the events”. The News Search service, with news related themes in mind works out query predictions and related queries.