Jul 20, 2011 08:45 GMT  ·  By

As expected, Apple has approved Google+ for iPhone, a social networking application developed by the Mountain View search giant.

As the company behind the world’s most popular search engine puts it, “Google+ for mobile makes sharing the right things with the right people a lot simpler.”

“Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most.”

“And no matter where you are, the stream lets you stay in the loop about what your friends are sharing and where they’re checking in,” reads the official App Store description for Google+.

The app’s flagship feature is, of course, Circles, which lets you “share the right things with just the right people.”

“Stream is where you can get updates from your circles or see what people are saying about things nearby,” Google continues.

Within an hour of the official Google+ release, Punit Soni (lead product manager, Google+ Mobile) went on record to confirm that Apple had mistakenly approved an older test version of Google+ for iPhone, which had caused headaches for early adopters.

“We discovered an issue with the version of the iPhone Google+ App that was on the App Store,” Soni wrote via Google+ online.

“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,” he explained.

“It started serving the correct version a little later. If you downloaded within the first 1 hour 40 mins, you may have downloaded the older test version,” Soni said.

Version 1.0.1.1809 of Google+ is currently up for grabs on the App Store.

Download Google+ for iPhone (Free)

The app is compatible with iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.

It features better support for blocking unwanted messages in Huddle, better support for attaching photos to a post, and incorporates various bug fixes that address performance.

iOS 5 is currently not supported, though some users have been able to install and run it on Apple’s latest beta.