Warning, this is a bit of a rant and the reason why I didn’t post as many photos today as usual… Recently, the Google+ Android App got a big update with some interesting and useful design changes and a lot of improvements under the hood, which meant that for the first time the app didn’t slow down my whole tablet to a crawl. Reading, posting comments, even the problematic browsing of my own photo galleries works perfectly and I seemed to have a completely new tablet because everything else became lightening fast.

But today, I actually tried to post something and my tablet locked up to the point that I had to make a hard reset – the pin-in-hole kind. On the next reboot, the whole tablet was extremely slow, probably because the crash had damaged the database of the G+ app. It took me almost two hours to deinstall the app and then I also had to deinstall Chrome and Hangouts because they also slowed up the device. After reinstalling the three, everything worked fine again. And then I tried to post again and exactly the same thing happened. At the moment I’m on round three and have come to the conclusion that it’s pointless: the sharing/writing component of the Google+ app simply breaks my tablet.

This should not happen on a device which I just bought last year – it’s by no means a high-end tablet, but Android 4.1.1 on an 1.6 GHz dual-core cpu with 1 GB RAM should really be enough to run the Google+ app, which works absolutely fine until you want to actually post something. Interestingly, on my older tablet which only has a 1.2 GHz single-core processor and 512 MB RAM, the share/edit box does not crash, so I fear that this whole thing is a bad bug only happening on certain devices. The problematic thing is that I cannot even file a proper bug report because the tablet even crashes doing that! This is all extremely frustrating to the point that I just want to give up.

Option A would be going back to the older version, which is not really acceptable because it slows down my whole tablet and needs constant cache-clearing to keep it working. Posting, with a lot of patience, works though, but it’s hardly worth the effort.

Option B would be keeping the new version for reading and commenting, but not posting. This would mean that I would only be able to post via the WordPress Publicize feature to Google+, and that means especially for posting photos that I won’t be able to post full-size images to Google+ any more. I am seriously considering this for the hot days when I can’t use the laptop much over the day, although I might post the full-size photos later.

Option C would be for Google to fix this bug!! I don’t want to complain about something that’s free, but I’m really frustrated at this point of having the possibility to do everything comfortably from the tablet, but being prevented by buggy software from it. Come on, Google – you’re better than this! The G+ app is the best thing out there and should not suffer from bugs like this.

Option D only occurred to me the next morning – why not use the G+ mobile website? To my surprise, the mobile website now hast about 90% of the features of the app and getting to my albums to post photos certainly seems no problem. And because I’m already in the mobile web browser using WordPress I would not even need to switch apps, only tabs. I’ll be testing this later today.

The bottom line is, I don’t have anything against Google+ and actually love the Android app especially in the new version, but if such a bug prevents me from sharing content from my mobile device, what can I say? Please fix this problem, Google!

In the unlikely event anyone from Google actually reads this post, my tablet is an Odys Genio running Android 4.1.1 on a 1.6 GHz dual-core Rockchip RK3066 processor with 1 GB RAM and 8 GB flash, not rooted or anyhow else modified from the factory version.

[Update June 17th: It seems like the recent version 4.4.2.68956353 from June 13th has fixed the crash on the posting box, at least on my tablet. Did someone from Google really listen to my bug reports or was that just coincidence? I have no idea! I’m going to write another post soon about this issue.]