Hindi News by Dainik Bhaskar

Review by eFreeware

If you read Hindi news and care more about what happened on your street than what happened in the capital, this app is built for you. Dainik Bhaskar is one of India's largest Hindi newspaper groups, and its Android app carries that newsroom to your phone: city reporting, video bulletins, and digital editions of the paper. With more than 100 million installs and a 4.0 average across roughly 697,000 ratings, it is clearly a mainstream choice rather than a niche one.

The pitch is local depth. The app draws on coverage of more than 2,000 towns and cities, and the group's reporting strength sits in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh and Himachal Pradesh. If you live in one of those states, or have family there, the app's center of gravity matches your interests closely.

It is free and ad-supported, with no in-app purchases. That shapes what you get: a broad free service with advertising in the mix. What follows is what the app offers, where the trade-offs sit, and who I think gets the most value from it.

City reporting is the reason to install it

The core of the app is hyperlocal news. The developer promises real-time updates on the things that actually disrupt a day: crime, accidents, water shortages, power cuts, road work and traffic jams. For anyone who has moved away from home but still wants to know what is happening in their hometown, that is a genuinely useful service, and it is the sort of thing national outlets rarely bother with.

The group backs this with a newsroom of more than 3,000 journalists, which is the number that makes 2,000-plus cities plausible rather than aspirational. Scale matters here: local reporting is expensive, and a smaller operation could not sustain it across that many places. The app also pushes real-time notifications, so breaking stories in your city can reach you without you opening anything.

I would expect this to be most valuable to readers in tier-two and tier-three cities and towns, where local coverage in Hindi is otherwise thin. If you follow a handful of regional stories closely, the city feed is likely to become the part of the app you check first.

The ePaper turns the app into a reading archive

The ePaper section gives you the Hindi edition of the paper for your city, with access to more than 200 editions going back as far as a year. You can download an edition and read it whenever you like, which makes the app workable for people who prefer the structure of a printed paper over a rolling feed.

The year-long archive is the detail I find most interesting. It gives the app a second life as a reference tool: if you want to check how a local story developed, or find a notice or result you saw months ago, the back catalog is there. That is a different use case from breaking news, and it is the one feature here that a pure news feed cannot replicate.

Downloading editions also means you can read them at your own pace. For readers who like to work through a paper at their own pace, that combination of archive and offline reading is the most substantial thing the app offers.

Video, investigations and the wider desks

Beyond text, the app carries video news across local, national, global, business, sports, health, lifestyle, tech and auto topics, delivered as short clips you can pass on to friends and family. Short-form video is how a lot of people now consume news, and having it inside the same app as the written reporting saves jumping between services.

DB Originals is the app's investigative strand, covering stories in more depth and explaining what the events mean for readers rather than just reporting them. There is also a dedicated women's section produced by a team of women journalists, covering subjects the developer says are chosen for their impact on daily life and told from a female perspective.

The standard desks are all present: politics and elections, crime and accidents, business with share market, SENSEX, BSE, NSE, NIFTY, trading, IPO and gold rate coverage, sports including cricket, football, tennis, athletics, Formula 1 and WWE, and entertainment spanning Bollywood, Hollywood and K-Pop. Rashifal adds daily horoscopes covering love life, career, health and wealth, along with tarot and numerology from named astrologers such as Bejan Daruwalla.

That is a wide brief, and the breadth is the point. One app covers the local crime report, the election speech, the market close and your horoscope. The risk of that much content is that the feed can feel crowded, and readers who only want city news will spend time scrolling past sections they never open.

What you need before you start

Setup is minimal. The app is free to download from Google Play, and there are no in-app purchases to consider. You install it, and the content is there. The app has been on the store since January 2014, so it is a long-established product rather than a new experiment, and it was last updated in October 2026.

The one thing to plan for is advertising. The app is ad-supported, so the free version carries commercial interruptions. If uninterrupted reading matters to you, factor that in before you commit to it as your main news source.

The other practical consideration is language. This is a Hindi news product, and the reporting, video and ePaper editions are built around Hindi readers. If you are comfortable in Hindi and want local coverage in that language, you are the intended audience.

Who gets the most from it

If your news diet is mostly local, this app is aimed directly at you, and the combination of city updates, notifications and a downloadable paper covers the main ways people follow local news.

A second group is readers who want a paper-like experience on a phone. The ePaper archive, with editions going back a year and the option to download them, suits people who like to sit with a full edition rather than skim headlines. That habit is not for everyone, but for those who have it, the app supports it well.

The app is broad enough that casual readers will find plenty to browse: video clips, sports, entertainment, business and horoscopes all sit alongside the local reporting. Readers who want a single general-interest Hindi news app rather than a specialist one will find the range useful, even if they only ever touch a few sections.

A dependable local news app with ads in the mix

Hindi News by Dainik Bhaskar does one thing unusually well and several things competently. The local reporting across more than 2,000 cities, backed by a large newsroom, is the reason to install it, and the ePaper archive gives it staying power beyond the daily feed. The wider desks, video and horoscope content round it out for readers who want one app for everything.

The trade-offs are straightforward. It is a free, ad-supported app, so expect commercial interruptions alongside your reading. It is a Hindi-language product, which is a strength if that is your language and a limitation if it is not. And the sheer breadth of sections means the app can feel busier than a reader who only wants city news might like.

My recommendation is simple: if you are a Hindi reader with ties to a city or town in the regions this newsroom covers, install it. The local coverage and the downloadable ePaper are the parts that justify a place on your phone, and the 4.0 average from a very large number of ratings suggests most people who try it keep it.