The growth, adoption and usability of social networking have been consistently befriended with the mobile industry since smart mobile devices begun mainstreaming over the past few years. The social-mobile connection is natural- People want to share their life experiences and mobile allows them to do that anytime, anywhere.
In fact, social networks and mobile devices already have such a close BFF relationship, that most social networking users are on-the-go: Over the past six months Facebook and Twitter revealed that most of their users are mobile and in the last couple of days, Google+ also disclosed this similar utilization by the vast of its users.
As it appears, Facebook was first to jump with both legs on the mobile train by beginning to allow (impose would be more accurate to say) developers to integrate the social network’s features on their apps with built-in like and follow actions. In nowadays fast-moving tech world, timing is vital and Google is (again) late.
Google has announced that it is bringing Google+ into the hands of mobile developers so they could implement the different social network’s features in their apps. The problem is that while many developers are rushing to integrate Facebook (or already did), Google+ mobile SDK roll out is slow. Very slow. Perhaps too slow.
The release of Google+ SDK for Android will be available only in the next few weeks and the SDK for iOS is currently only available in Developer Preview which means that developers can play and experiment with it but not implementing it to publicly live apps. Again, this small latency time-frame compared to Facebook can turn out to be crucial.
Until Google+ mobile SDK will be fully available, many developers of popular apps might already integrate Facebook’s features. I don’t know how fast they would decide to combine additional social network attributes on their apps, if at all. The fact that Google+ user-base is just about one tenth of Facebook’s also doesn’t play in Google’s favor.
In any case, these are the Google+ social features that will be open for developers to integrate:
- Google+ sign-in button
- Share/+1 plugins
- Google+ history API
- Google+ APIs
If you are a mobile developer and you wish to learn more, here are the Google+ mobile platform documentations for Android, iOS and mobile web.