Having been pretty close to many mobile apps that came out of NBC in the early boom days, I can confirm that this was the case for many/most of the apps I ever

Having been pretty close to many mobile apps that came out of NBC in the early boom days, I can confirm that this was the case for many/most of the apps I ever touched. Most of them were pretty bad, just RSS driven web pages in a native wrapper. Getting the brand onto users' devices was the primary goal, experience be damned. I can't speak to Breaking News, that was a different team.