With Google Maps receiving an update just yesterday afternoon and the Google app in the beta channel being updated earlier today, Google is continuing the momentum of improving their products and services. The most recent app from Google to get an update is Google+ although not so drastic as the update towards the end of last year which saw Google introduce a whole new UI to their social platform. With today’s update which brings the user forward to version 7.0, most of the tweaks are fixes to resolve problems that appeared after the last major update, although there are a couple of new changes to look out for.
Google states that the update is beginning to roll out but the process will happen over the next couple of days, meaning not everyone will get the update immediately. Once the update does come through, though, users will be greeted with a whole bunch of fixes to issues that have been hanging around for the last couple of months. All in all, there are 69 bugs that Google has resolved with this update, in addition to 14 fixes for the accessibility issues that users have been experiencing.
There are technically no new features to speak of, but Google has made a handful of improvements to the Google+ app and user interface. The first and most noticeable will likely be the auto-hide functionality for the tab bar that was introduced with the UI change. The tab bar is normally visible at the bottom of the screen, and while this isn’t changing or being removed, Google has made it so that the tab bar hides itself when users scroll through their streams. Alongside the auto-hide function, users will now be able to move to other screens on the tab (like notifications for example) without disrupting their position on the home stream as it now remembers the last place on the stream that users were at. Lastly, Google+ will now display a prompt that recommends users add a Collection or join a Community if they aren’t engaged with any in the first place, making an attempt to get users to interact more with either as those are two of Google+ headlining features.