It’s no secret that India hasn’t exactly warmed up to the iPhone. Delayed releases, high prices, poor after-sales support, and poor public perception of the platform has led to it having a tiny user base. A search for India in the App Store results in low quality crapps that try to sell you something you shouldn’t download for free. There are at least 20 of these 99¢ ‘joke’ and ‘fact’ apps on the store, none of which I assume are anything more than scraped content off the web. So imagine my surprise when NDTV, a major news network informed me they were doing a native iPhone app. Quite surprised, I was.

Designed and developed for NDTV by Robosoft Tech, the app takes its design cues from the previous Facebook for iPhone, or several of the news apps like USA Today. It’s got the familiar tab bar at the bottom, lists for articles, and easy to understand controls for articles and other media. They’ve even got an awkward scroll down to refresh, though not nearly as elegant as Tweetie, works just fine. Overall, it’s a design that’s neither pretty, nor ugly. I do believe they could have eased up on the chrome, but it’s well within acceptable terms.

I’ve been using the app these past few days, and while I don’t generally follow political or local news, I did find myself going through some slideshows of upcoming bollywood flicks, and saw my State mentioned in the national news for all the wrong reasons. The article view is typographically pleasing, where the landscape view removes all of the UI chrome, leaving you with just the content. The application is pretty deep. It’s got a bunch of news sections, favourites, weather, share with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. It even comes with an ‘iWitness’ feature which allows you to upload a photo along with a story for community news submission. It also comes with Push Notifications for what I assume is breaking news stories, as I’m yet to receive a notification from this app.

The one big issue with this app is the ugly ad banner. The ad wasn’t enabled during the beta, the contrast of which is striking. It’s safe to say the Indian corporations do not understand mobile devices, and in this instance have practically ruined the experience of their first step onto the next generation mobile platform. NDTV is a major news corporation, with a huge viewership, yet they’re up to petty business practices. Build your brand on this new mobile platform, get a headstart over the competition, make people want to launch your app as their one access to Indian news media, and then figure out your business model. Moreover, the advertisement is not even something worth looking at. Delivered by an Indian-International ad agency ‘inMobi’, the ad (as of this review) is a bright yellow animated banner for a very silly iPhone app, totally unrelated to the content. Let’s not forget that when you tap one of these ads, you’re chucked out of the app (without a warning). Thankfully it doesn’t show when viewing an article in landscape or during image slideshows. Maybe I’m being a little too harsh with my criticism, but I expected better from NDTV.

If you’re one to follow ‘regular’ news, NDTV has definitely made a strong point with this app. It’s feature rich, content heavy, and it’s a free download at the App Store. So if you can live with the ugly ad banner, you might just want to keep it on your home screen.