Hands-on: Google+ mobile app for Android

Google’s new social network, Google+, launched this week with much fanfare. The service has a Facebook-like news feed, a group video chat feature, and a compelling contact management system that gives users granular control over the visibility of the content they publish. But how well does it work on smartphones?

The desire for mobile access to social networks is a significant factor driving smartphone adoption among consumers. The success of Google+ will partly depend on the quality of the user experience the service offers on mobile devices. Because Google isn’t just a Web developer but also major mobile platform vendor through Android, the company has an opportunity to offer deep integration between its new social networking service and the popular smartphone operating system. (A promised iOS native app is said to be coming soon.)

The Google+ mobile client for Android is currently a stand-alone application with only a few minor hooks into the underlying platform, however. Google has started by delivering the core functionality and a few compelling extras—but a ton of potential lies untapped.

The main features available in the mobile application today include push notifications, access to the message stream, the ability to view your own profile, photo viewing and uploading, circle management, and a group messaging system called Huddle. The main landing screen of the Google+ application displays icons for accessing these features, and it has a notification slider that can be pulled up from the bottom of the screen. The layout is quite similar to that of the Facebook application.

The application’s stream interface is a condensed view of the main content stream from the website. It shows posts from people who you follow, and you can slide the view to the right to see a special stream of messages posted by people who are geographically nearby. You can also slide to the left to see the full “incoming” stream, which displays messages from users who are following you in addition to ones who you are following.

The sliding gesture is pretty natural and makes it feel a bit like TweetDeck, but the implementation could still use some work—I often accidentally slide it to one side or the other when I’m just trying to scroll vertically. Another annoying bug: the stream view will jump back to the beginning of the timeline when you change the device’s orientation.

To write your own post, just hit the pencil icon in the toolbar; it lets you select the recipients, input text, add location data, and attach a photo.

Messages are displayed with their like count, geolocation information, and an excerpt of posted comments. You can click a message to get a complete view of the comments or to post a response. You can also mute a conversation by tapping the triple-dot icon in the top corner and selecting “mute” from the popup menu.

The Circles area of the program shows a list of your circles and the number of people in each one. If you click a circle, it will show you a list of all members. If you click the “posts” tab at the bottom, you get a filtered view of the stream that contains only the posts from users in the selected circle. At the present time, there doesn’t appear to be a mobile equivalent of the drag-and-drop circle management interface that Google offers on the Google+ website.

The photo functionality is more or less what you’d expect. You can upload images to the service and you can see galleries of photos posted by people you follow and photos in which you have been tagged. The galleries show photos in a simple grid with the associated comment count for each one. You can tap a photo to view it, and then swipe left and right to rotate through the other images in the gallery.