Google+ app for iPad available now in the App Store
In May, we redesigned the Google+ experience for iPhone, adding full bleed photos that fall into place and bold visual elements that bring your stream to life. Today, we're introducing new features for iPhone and an iPad app that you won't be able to put down.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google+ has been an App Store success story before — it was the top free app in the App Store within weeks of its July 2011 launch — but until now that momentum lived entirely on the iPhone. The iPad release closes the last big gap in Google's social client on Apple hardware, and it lands two weeks after Chrome arrived on iPhone and iPad, continuing a deliberate 2012 push to put Google's flagship services into native iOS apps rather than waiting on mobile web.
The timing matters because the iPad is where the audience is: prior coverage in this corpus pegged it at 97% of tablet web traffic and generating more traffic than the iPhone itself. A social network built around full-bleed photos, as the May iPhone redesign was, is arguably most at home on the larger screen — which is why the absence of an iPad app had been conspicuous.
First-order effects
- Google+ users on iPad move from a scaled-up phone interface to a purpose-built tablet app carrying over the May redesign's full-bleed photo stream, giving Google its first native tablet surface for the network.
- Google now fields dedicated iPad apps across search (the November 2011 Search app), browser, and social — all subject to Apple's App Store review rather than Google's own distribution.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter face pressure to match tablet-native, photo-forward designs on the device that dominates tablet usage, since Google+ can now claim the more polished large-screen experience.
- Every feature Google ships through Apple's storefront deepens its reliance on a competitor's approval process — the same tension Chrome's June arrival created, now extended to the social layer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's consumer strategy on tablets becomes services-first: win usage on the dominant tablet platform regardless of who makes it, treating Android tablets as one endpoint among several rather than the required one.
- Social apps competing on capture-and-display quality rather than network size points toward a market where design velocity on each platform, not exclusivity, decides engagement — an instance of interoperability shifting where the moat sits.
The trend: Google is steadily rebuilding its consumer products as polished native apps inside Apple's ecosystem, conceding the platform battle to compete on service quality.