The two big social media pillars, Facebook and Twitter, both released Wedneseday updates to their respective Android apps, a big win for Android users and the platform itself, which traditionally trails the iPhone in receiving the latest features.
Buried amidst other big announcements, like the launch of a brand new deals program for its location-based platform, Places, Facebook said Wednesday that its Android app will finally be catching up with the fully-featured iPhone counterpart. Starting today, Android users now have access to Places, Groups, and Single Sign On.
Places, which debuted on the iPhone in August, lets users check in to establishments, like restaurants, museums or other businesses, alerting their friends to where they are in the world at that very moment. Though startups like Foursquare and Gowalla have been providing this service for much longer, Facebook has the instant advantage of 200 million members who use the site on mobile.
(Places on the iPhone now lets businesses give deals to users who check in, so Android development technically still hasn’t caught up with the iPhone just yet.)
The other big change coming to Facebook for Android is Groups, the revamped tool for organizing groups of just about any type–sports teams, a music lovers community, a book reading club, anything. In fact, it seems that Facebook has inconspicuously refused to offer many examples of what kinds of groups users will create precisely because they want users to pull the feature in whatever direction they may.
(The new Facebook for iPhone also now includes Groups.)
Finally, Facebook offered developers a new feature called Single Sign On, intended to streamline the mobile experience for users. Effective immediately, users can log in to Android apps Flixster, Groupon, Loopt, SCVNGR, Yelp and Zynga Poker with just a couple taps (bypassing registration or password input screens). It’s kind of like Facebook Connect for mobile.
The new Twitter for Android, available today on devices with Android 2.1 or higher, adds a Tweet details page, speed enhancements and UI polish.
On the Tweet details page, which has been one of the most useful pages on Twitter’s iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone clients, users can easily perform a variety of functions, like favoriting, retweeting and replying.
Users will also be happy to hear that Twitter has upgraded the app to improve tweet timeline loading and scrolling.
As for the smaller updates, Twitter for Android, again playing catch up with the iPhone, now includes two awesomely intuitive features. The first: when at the top of the stream, simply “pull down” to refresh. The second: swipe any tweet for retweet, reply, and other functions. Lastly, the app now includes high-resolution profile pictures.
