Indian Railway is one of the largest rail road network in the world and has an enormous number of people using the services. IRCTC, which is the online railway ticket booking portal, has been the only way to book tickets online.. We had seen many IRCTC applications in the Android and also Windows store earlier and all of them were unofficial versions. They had fair share of issues including random crashes and some privacy issues as well.
Indian Railways took a quantum leap by launching the IRCTC app on the Google Play Store. The application is called IRCTC Connect and it lets users login with their IRCTC credentials and book the tickets. Users will be amused to find that all the functionalities of the IRCTC web portal have been neatly blended in to its Android app.
The number of Internet users are on a steady rise and considering the fact that a major chunk of people are hooked to their smartphone, it makes more sense for the IRCTC application. IRCTC had recently upgraded their infrastructure so that they can support up to 7,200 ticket bookings per minute and a maximum capacity to handle 120,000 users at any given point of time. The downside is that IRCTC has restricted the use of the application from morning 8 to 12 AM so if you are trying to book a tatkal ticket than you will be in for a disappointment.
The UI and the UX of the app is pretty good and the application seemed to work perfectly fine for us expect some small niggles like the delay in the items getting synced with the website. The download numbers for this app are skyrocketing and we hope that IRCTC will keep revising the app from time to time and will remove the timing restrictions from the application, which can be downloaded from here.
