All India Radio (AIR), officially known as Akashvani (literally, 'Voice from the sky'), is the national public radio broadcaster of India. Established in 1930, it is the sister service of Doordarshan, the national public television broadcaster. All India Radio is one of the largest radio networks in the world.
A few days ago, the official All India Radio Live app arrived on the Windows Phone Store. The All India Radio Live app offers a bouquet of infotainment and public service broadcasts rendered in Hindi, Urdu, and some major regional Indian languages. The app also aims to knit Indians cutting across geographical boundaries, especially the ones living abroad who crave for channels where their mother tongue is spoken and folklore is enjoyed.
The app features several popular stations available via a single tap on the home screen of the app. These are Vividh Bharati, FM Gold, FM Rainbow, AIR Urdu, AIR Gujarati, AIR Marathi, AIR Punjabi, and AIR Malayalam. You can add one or more stations as favorites, but that doesn't really help, since all stations are available on the home screen without too much scrolling anyway.
There's a link to AIR's Facebook and Twitter page, and a banner that displays email for feedback. These could definitely be better done. There's no social sharing, and the email banner could be replaced by a form to submit feedback or something. Lazy execution, really.
Still, if you want to listen to an AIR radio station with the ability to skip forward to jump back (unlike usual radio broadcast), this is a handy app. It could be much better, yes, but maybe the intent was just plain vanilla broadcast.
Thanks, Gurinder Singh, for the tip!
