• eWeek.com, Wednesday, July 20, 2011 12:25 PM

The mobile app for Google+ just became available for the iPhone, and it's already the top free program in the iTunes App Store. Showing consumers' taste for (curiosity around?) Google's latest social effort, its popularity doesn't seem to have been hurt by the existence of a few initial glitches. "When we launched, the App Store started serving a previous test version of the app which didn't have the stability and fixes that the latest version had," Punit Soni, lead product manager for Google+ Mobile, explained. "It started serving the correct version a little later."

Overall, eWeek.com estimates that Google+ may have as many as 18 million users -- still a far cry from Facebook's reported 700 million members, but a good start nonetheless. The Apple-friendly app allows users to publish updates to their Google+ Stream and see the links, pictures and updates posted to the service by people in their Circles, according to eWeek. "Users may also manage those Circles." That said, eWeek adds, iPhone users can't enjoy the Instant Upload feature, which lets Android phone users automatically shuttle photos they take on their smartphones to Google+.

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