Yesterday, the unexpected happened. Google+ App became available for Apple users. After holding out on other Google app releases, Apple decided to give this one to Google. Maybe it’s due to the fact that Google+ is rapidly gaining users, including iPhone owners. As of yesterday, the new social network is said to have 18 million active users already.
But the initial release was not as smooth as expected, as the test version of the app was the one released. Bugs include: logging out randomly, frequent freezing, inability to download on iPad, incompatibility with iPod Touch, frequent crashing, streams wont load, streams wont update, incompatibility with iOS 5 (to be expected since 5 is beta), inability to re-share posts, inability to see streams page, uploading photos crashes app, crashing upon photo taking, inability to log in, no instant upload, app disappearing.
“When we launched, the App Store started serving a previous test version of the app which didn’t have the stability and fixes that the latest version had,” Punit Soni, lead product manager for Google+ Mobile, explains. “It started serving the correct version a little later. If you downloaded within the first 1 hour 40 mins, you may have downloaded the older test version.”
Soni encouraged early installers to check the version of their Google+ by clicking on the gear icon on the top left of the app’s home screen. The new version is 1.0.1.1809. If consumers have the bugged version, it is recommended that they uninstall the app and reinstall the newer version.
Though the bug has been fixed, there are still some features that are only available in Android devices, like the instant upload. So yeah, that’s still a bummer, especially for those people that love documenting their every move and updating their status with pictures.
[...] of the surprising results was the high level of interest in the Google+ platform, which has yet to even offer an API for mobile developers. But in the coming 12-18 months, mobile [...]