Worse than useless: buggy, incomplete, and non-secure

First of all, I’m happy that Air India finally decided to make an iOS app, especially now that they have joined Star Alliance, and I really hope they will invest in improving the app, because a massive improvement is needed to make the app useful, let alone good.

Issues:

1. NO SYNC. The most immediately glaring problem with the app is that it doesn’t sync with one’s existing Air India account on the website. You have to register separately for the app and the website, and information from bookings make on their website will not appear in the app (and, I presume, vice versa). In the 21st century, this makes no sense and makes the app pretty useless unless you make all your bookings only from the app and never use the Air India website. Very inconvenient. The app should be designed so that a user can log into the app with the same email and password used to register for airindia.in (without needing to re-register for the app), and then all of the booking, history, preferences, and other information from the airindia.in account should be synchronized to the app automatically — but none of this happens with this very rudimentary, poorly programmed app. I have a current booking that I made on airindia.in, but when I log into the app and tap “My Bookings,” it simply returns an error: “MY_BOOKING_LIST_NOT_FOUND.” Must use the airindia.in website.

2. INCOMPLETE. Most of the features one expects from an airline app are not present in this app. For example, there is no flight status tracking at all (which is actually the main reason i downloaded this app in the first place). There is no way to check your frequent flier status. There is no flight history. There’s almost nothing, in fact, except booking a flight, checking previous bookings made through the app (but not through the Air India website), and changing your basic profile information. So, this is less an app and more a widget for making bookings. Star Alliance customers expect more, so I hope Air India will invest in making a proper app in the future.

3. BUGGY. Parts of the app don’t handle data entry properly. For example, when trying to enter my date of birth, the app would not accept my entry and kept reverting to today’s date. (Also, the label text in the entry field for “date of birth” says “please select your gender” instead of “please select your date of birth.”)

4. NOT SECURE. After you register to use the app, your password will be sent to you by email in PLAIN TEXT. This should never, ever, ever happen, and it’s a sign of major incompetence on the part of Air India’s tech team. One wonders how many security breaches their servers will suffer and how many times customer information will be harvested by goodness knows whom.

5. LAZY. The supplemental information available in the menu (e.g. “News,” “Travel Information,” etc.) are served directly from the regular Air India website is are not formatted well for being read in the app’s built-in browser. For example, the website menu slides up and down, covering the text one is trying to read. Even worse, the “check in” feature in the app simply loads the check-in page from airindia.in directly in the app’s built-in browser, which again is poorly formatted for mobile devices and very difficult to read and to navigate. A proper iOS app should have native check-in functionality and should not merely load a poorly formatted page from the website.

6. English. Since this app is for international use (and available in, for example, the US app store), Air India should really hire a professional English editor to correct the mistakes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

Considering all of these issues, you’re much better off just loading airindia.in in your web browser, as this app does almost nothing, and the few things it does do are more easily accomplished on the Air India website.

Air India should study the United app as an example of a really good iOS app for a Star Alliance airline.

liber8 about Air India