Finally. Over a year after iPhone users got their native Yammer fix, Android has an official Yammer application available on Android Market. The application, while still fairly basic, comes with support for most of Yammer’s core functionality. If you use Yammer and you have an Android phone, you’ll want this app. We can’t link directly to the app because Google still hasn’t launched a strong web presence for the Market, but you can find it by running a query for “Yammer” from your phone.
The new application is actually derived from the codebase of Yowl, a third party app for Android that Yammer acquired a couple months ago. CEO David Sacks says that the application has been off the Market since the acquisition, primarily so that the team could fix a few issues. Now it’s good to go.
While a mobile application isn’t totally essential to using Yammer (you can use SMS, and the web app works well enough from mobile browsers), they sure make life easier. The Android application can automatically notify you when you have new messages, and you can leave it running all day in the background (on the iPhone you have to set up Push notifications). We’ve relied heavily on Yammer since its launch at TechCrunch50 2008, and this will make things much easier for those of us who have made the jump from the iPhone (or something else) to Android.
I’ve been playing with the app throughout the day and found it to work well overall, but it isn’t perfect yet. I found a bug or two (for instance, whenever I try to jump back in a message I’m writing to correct a typo, the whole message disappears). And there are some features that aren’t in the app yet, like the ability to granularly control which messages should issue an audio/vibrating alert. Sacks says the app will definitely be upgraded with more features in the future.