Following last month's appearance of a leaked promotional video for an iOS version of Google Now, an update for the official Google Search app for iOS has hit the App Store with Google Now in tow. With Google Now, iOS users will be given weather and traffic information that's relevant to their needs as well as breaking news and sports scores. The Google Search app is available to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices running iOS 5 or later and is 20.3MB in size.
Google Now for iOS sports a look and feel similar to its Android counterpart, offering users various tidbits of information in small cards that can be swiped away. There are a number of different card types available to iOS users, including ones for stocks, birthdays, weather, upcoming appointments, weather and sports. However, there does appear to be a few card types that are available with the Android version of Google Now but are missing from the iOS flavor, such as boarding pass support and Fandango ticketing.
It's also worth noting that iOS users can't access Now while anywhere in the OS with a simple swipe up from the home button like Android users can. That means that Apple fans will need to settle for placing the Google Search app on a home page or in their app dock. Finally, it doesn't look like Google Now will push alerts to the iOS Notification Center like it does with Android's notification shade.
So far the app seems to perform pretty well on an iPhone 5, quickly bringing up news, sports scores, weather and additional cards and scrolling through them all smoothly. While the experience of using Google Now on iOS won't be quite the same as it would be on Android, it's still a pretty nice piece of software that can present users with a lot of important information in a clean, easily-digestible manner. The Google Search app for iOS, complete with Google Now built in, can be found by hitting up the iTunes link below.
