In Detail: Google+ for Android 3.6

Google announced a lot of changes in today's Google+ app update. But this post will cover some of the updates that weren't mentioned in the official announcement.

The Stream

So here's what the redesigned stream looks like on a phone:

The new stream

It's only a minor upgrade but it helps to further refine the look of the stream, and it allows images to resize much more easily than before. My favourite feature is how the latest three comments animate below the bottom of a post with a line under the corresponding avatar.


The tablet view has received some changes as well, it now scrolls horizontally for consistency rather than scrolling vertically in previous versions. Here's what it looks like on my Nexus 7:

Fellow team member +Lee Jarratt reports that it looks great on his Nexus 10 as well!

Circles

Some default actions have been changed - For page suggestions, clicking "Follow" adds pages straight to the 'Follow' circle whereas for profile suggestions, clicking "Add" will add them to the 'Friends' circle.

Scrolling all the way down in the 'Find People' section shows us the improved view of my Circles:

I love the varying profile picture sizes!

Another update in regards to Circles (as reported by +Alex Reusch in our Google+ Updates community ) is that when visiting a specific circle in the stream you can see the members of that circle above it:

A new feature here is that you can click the "Settings" button seen above to control individual settings for that circle, just like the new ones we saw introduced on desktop earlier today.

Other

As reported by +Daniel Roca you can now grab a link for a post using the action bar:

This could be useful for sharing posts with others who do not use +Google+. Finally, another update reported by +Daniel Hernández is that when searching for posts you can now choose between 'Best of' and 'Most recent' just like the desktop version:

Unfortunately the new photo editing features appear to be just for the iPhone version of the app at the moment but we are sure they will come to +Android soon. Meanwhile you can use +Snapseed for the full photo editing experience.

Conclusion

There were plenty of updates to the +Google+ app today and these are just a few of them. We owe a big thanks to our growing community called Google+ Updates for helping us to report these updates today.

What other updates did you spot? Let us know in the comments or in the Google+ Updates community!