Ever since the official Google+ app for iPhone came out in July, we’ve followed the development as Google’s new social experiment added more features, and seemingly dropped in traffic as the novelty effect wore off for many. I was pretty satisfied with the 1.0 release, albeit the custom UI and lack of functionalities turned an highly anticipated launch into a discussion as to whether Google should be focusing on making its iOS apps more native to iOS and less Android-ish. An update in August brought support for iPod touch and iPad in compatibility mode – two options that were mysteriously absent in the first release.
A new version of Google+, as noted by The Next Web, was pushed to the App Store a few minutes ago, adding support for “reshares”, as well as bug fixes and performances improvements. From my first tests, I’m happy to see the app doesn’t crash on iOS 5 beta 7 and everything seems to be quite snappy and responsive while navigating between sections, the stream, and comments. As for resharing others’ posts, it works just like on the Google+ website – once you’ve selected a post, you can hit the “arrow button” at the bottom to bring up a menu to reshare, mute, or report a post. Reshare will open a new window populated with the original post and author, and a text field to add your own thoughts, set location and circles. Reshared posts will be nicely formatted both for the web and iOS app.
From the release notes:
- Reshare support
- Set your profile photo
- Improved autocomplete in Huddle
- Properly refresh notifications when returning to the app
- Create new circle from Circles destination
- Fixed 2-step verification issues
You can download Google+ for iOS for free on the App Store.
