Quora launches Android app with impressive features

Quora, the popular question and answer website, launched its highly anticipated Android app Thursday to much fanfare. With a quarter of its regular traffic coming from mobile users, this was an important step for the company, according to VentureBeat.

The knowledge sharing site allows users to ask and answer questions about any topic. The company first released an iOS app in September 2011 and learned from the experience for the Android version, which required significantly more detail for the GUI design, as Android devices' screen sizes, resolution and power are not constant like the iPhone and iPad.

"The look and feel is very different from the iPhone app because we adopted Android’s design standards, based on the guidelines they released with Ice Cream Sandwich," said Anne Halsall, a designer at the company.

With its latest application development, Quora has provided users with a variety of new features as well. Voice search, a home screen widget and "deep search integration" will all provide users with a stronger experience and help to keep them more engaged in the app.

"The thinking is that this ratio is only going to go up from here," said Charlie Cheever, one of the founders of Quora. "A lot of people are going to be almost exclusively using mobile devices to access content, so we want to be on top of that."

One unique feature that users can now opt in to on Android devices is to have Quora results appear alongside regular Google ones anywhere search is possible on the device. The app also has improved performance, with the option to insert images from the device's camera.

The company also updated the iOS app recently in order to keep it comparable with the new Android version, according to NDTV. The new version of the app for iPhones and iPads allows for Facebook integration and has a new icon, though it is lacking the voice search support that the Android version has.

The new mobile application design uses native language for Android, though it switches to HTML5 for the actual content - a solution which should provide fast results for users. Cheever said that the goal was to go where the devices shines best.