Needless to say, Android had an app ages ago

Fair does. However, the iOS app seems to have benefitted from some things - e.g built in chat rather than forking out to a separate app - that the Android app doesn't have yet, one assumes because they decided to have it out at launch. However early reviews suggest the iOS app is doing some odd interface stuff in an Chrome style 'we don't like your OS's GUI so we're going to do our own just for this browser' kind of way.

None of which changes the fact that it turns out Google+ is pretty underwhelming a service regardless of how it's accessed

By "fork out" are you telling me they're not free for the iPhone? I've yet to pay for an Android app; there's just no need. I must have about 100 so far, of which only a couple are for farting.

Isn't the chat on google+ the normal google chat? Obviously there's been an app for that on Android since day one. Not that you need an app; if you just load google+ in the default browser on an Android you get a groovy interface including tabs for talk, mail, calender, photos etc.

The app for the iPhone is free.

Also the chat thing works with Android OS. I just saw a friend of mine come online in the "Chat" section and she had never heard of Google+ the message just popped up on her Android phone in a speech bubble from me

Very cool that it all works together.

I mean 'fork' in the programming sense. As far as I was aware, the Android Google+ app actually starts up a separate app to do the google chat, whereas the iOS version has it 'inbuilt'. To be honest, I've used Facebook chat about twice and I don't anticipate using Google+'s chat much more, it was just al illustration of the differences between the apps, which may have come about because the iOS app was a little later in development than the Android one - I'd expect the android app to be updated to also use inbuilt chat pretty soon as the updates int he code are rolled into it...

The web interface is obviously identical on both - it's HTML and they're using the same page renderer after all.

Jon

To be quite honest, I don't think that's obvious at all. It looks very different if you load it on my Nokia for example, and I have no idea what page rendererer anything uses.