Google+ for iPhone Comes with Bugs and Complaints

Google launched the iPhone app for Google+ this week, but users have been having a lot of trouble with it. Punit Soni, Lead Product Manager for Google+ Mobile has been talking about the issues with users on Google+.

Here are some of the complaints that people have reported:

- The app freezes up
- The app has gone section when a certain item was clicked. For example (and I saw this first hand), a user clicked “photos from phone” only to be taken to “Photos from Cicles”.
- frequent crashing
- No way to share

Soni posted the following:

- IOS5 is unsupported at this point.
- iPad/iPhone device support is coming soon.

1. It doesn’t keep me logged in. Even though I had told it to. Oh, wait, now it is.
- We have not seen this issue so far. But we are going to do another round of testing on Authentication and iterate.

2. I don’t see a way to upload a photo, like the Android app has. Nevermind, I found that, you have to click on the photos app where the camera icon is very small.
- Thanks for the feedback. We will take another look at our UI flows.

3. It frequently freezes on me.
- We discovered an issue where the App freezes when there are posts with tons of comments on it. We have a fix for it and its coming soon.

4. It has crashed twice so far. UPDATE: Six times.
- This may be related to the lack of IOS5 support. We are digging deep into other crash reports as we speak.

5. No way to share.
- That is a feature we are working on for both Android and iPhone. Coming soon.

In another post, he said:

We discovered an issue with the version of the iPhone Google+ App that was on the App Store. 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. 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.

To check:
- Click on the gear icon on the top left of your App’s homescreen and look right above the Help button, the version number of the App should be: 1.0.1.1809

- If that is not the version number, then please uninstall and reinstall by clicking on the link…

I’ve been using the Android app for a couple weeks now and haven’t had much in the way of complaints about it, but given that Google owns Android, it was no doubt much easier for Google to work out complications. It appears that iOS compatibility has been a bit more challenging. Probably also why it took longer to release in the first place.

I’ve noted in other articles how the Instant Upload feature of the Android app has been a very compelling feature in terms of driving further engagement with Google+ as a social network, and has led to more use of Picasa Web Albums. The lack of this functionality on iOS is an obstacle in itself.

Gaining the iOS crowd is key for Google+ growth. The company will no doubt work furiously to improve upon the app, at least as long as the iPhone and iPad retain their popularity.

Apple said on Tuesday that it sold 20.34 iPhones and 9.25 million iPads last quarter, making iPhone sales up 142% and iPad sales up 183% year-over-year.

Today, Soni said Google has made some tweaks to make the Nearby view in the Stream feature richer and fresher, promising more details soon.