Yammer Finally Works And Makes Work Possible On The iPad

Our love affair with Yammer is pretty hot and cold. On one hand, they launched at and won TechCrunch50a few years back. And they seem to be kicking ass on the business distribution front. On the other, the apps they put out there (which we use for TechCrunch day-to-day business) are often very buggy and more or less infuriating day in and day out. iPhone, Android, Web, AIR — they all have issues.

But issues are one thing. For the past year or so, I simply have not been able to get Yammer to work on the iPad — at all. It would launch and then crash. I tried this on four different iPads (both the first and second generation). Same result.

Today. Finally. They have released a native iPad app. And it works!

Version 4 of Yammer’s iOS has just hit the App Store. Previously, the app was optimized for iPhone/iPod touch only (which should still work on the iPad, but again, didn’t), but now it’s a universal binary build (meaning the iPad version is baked in as well). The iPad version works in both landscape and portrait mode and borrows from the excellent Twitter for iPad app in giving you three columns to work with: menu items, your feed, and individual yams.

Aside from the ability to actually work on the iPad, the app brings some nice tweaks and refinements across all versions. For one thing, the app seems much faster. There is also now a conversation thread view which looks nice. And they’ve also promised that this build is more stable.

Push Notifications, which have been a constant headache for us iPhone users, are also said to be improved. So far, I haven’t seen any proof of that, but we’ll see.

The app remains a free download and if you already have the iPhone version, just update your app to get the iPad version as well. You can find it in the App Store here.

The new app — which they pre-announced in March — also finally means they can match Salesforce’s competing Chatter app in terms of availability.

Now about that AIR app, Yammer… (hint: maybe just buy Gabble)