Today, Google rolled out a fresh update to their Google Analytics application on Android. It’s the big 3.0, so naturally it’s a pretty big update. Google brought in a new icon with this one, which is a bit of a weird looking icon, and uses basically the same colors of orange as the new Google Play Music icon (that update began rolling out yesterday when Podcasts launched). The bigger story here though, is that the app is finally material design. Yes it took Google that long to adopt their own design guidelines on their own OS.
You’ll notice in this update that the app is much cleaner here. It’s less gray, which is a nice change of pace, and makes things much easier to see. There’s still a lot of white space here, but it seems that Google has found the balance of white space and information shown. As the boxes in the app that show all of your traffic data, now takes up less space than before the update. Making it easy to see more information before needing to scroll within the app. Google has also moved all of the dropdown lists from that slideout menu there. They have instead used swipe-able boxes in each category page. While this doesn’t sound like a big change, it’s actually a pretty big one.
In addition to all of this, Google also added a quick stat sharing action to the information screens. So if you want to share some stats easily with someone, you can do so there with the standard Android sharing menu. This means you can share via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or basically any other app that is installed on your smartphone. Making for a great experience.
The update to Google Analytics is available in the Google Play Store right now. The app is a staged roll out as usual, so it may be a few days before you actually see the update appear on your device. It’s a pretty big update, and those that own websites are definitely going to need to get used to the way the app functions now. Google Analytics is a very important tool for those that do own websites, so that you are able to see what’s going on with your site when you are not at your desk.
