Major improvement, at last! Some years ago I tested the official Blogger app on Android, and it sucked. Downloaded, installed, and played with it again today, and it is significantly better now.
However, it still does not match Blogga Pro, another free - though non-official - Blogger app, that offers much better granular control and editing of posts. Blogga Pro (BP) was formerly known as Blogger Pro, I was surprised to see the name change. Probably because Google complained. While BP has a few annoying ads, the app feels more intuitive to blog with than this official one, and offers several more fine-tuning buttons for posts. Like, resizing photos, adding captions to them, and more, all in the little bar just above the keyboard. I don't see that on the official app.
A drawback of Blogga Plus is that when trying to share an article from a mobile web browser, it isn't included in the list of apps to use as sharing platform. A bit disappointing, but not that much, can always just copy the article link and come paste it into Blogga Pro before making noise about the article one wants to say something about. The official app, the one I'm testing now, does allow it for sharing from inside most browsers. Or so I thought, because that's what I remembered from the previous time I used it, and that was the sole reason I downloaded it today. Turns out, the official Blogger app does not appear anymore in the list of apps to share to, tested it just now in two major browsers.
Would have been stunning (which is why I bold this) if - when hitting the share button and selecting a blogging app - a blurb of an article together with the page URL gets grabbed by the blogging app, and pop it straight into the editor for a new blog post, where one then say something about it, before hitting publish.
Three minutes or less flat: Hit share in a browser, see article's first paragraph appear in blog editor, type your comment, publish, out, moving on to next news article. Man, any blogging app having that function (and doing it complies with copyright laws too; similar to how search engines grab a paragraph of a website) will make blogging explode. Who wouldn't like to say something about a news article (since most news websites don't allow commenting anymore) on one's own blog, as easily as it is to share an article to Facebook and saying something about it there in a quick post? Mobile blogging to one's Blogger blog should be made that easy and fast!
Two good things about the official Blogger app: It feels more 'clean' than BP, allowing for good distraction-free writing. And secondly, no ads. Yep, Google that's infamous for becoming the world's top spy while distracting you with ads, ain't showing no ads in its blogging app. (Or rather, I haven't seen any yet.) That saves a bit on data usage when using it, not that its competitor Blogga Pro's few ads (from Google, oh the irony) uses a lot of data, to the contrary, both apps are really light on data usage. Depending on the size of photos one adds to blog posts, of course.
With both the apps one needs to log into one of your Google accounts, which takes quite literally just two clicks and 1 second. (Then you remain signed in.) Then, also in both apps, a list of all one's different blogs under that Google account appears, select one, and start a new post on the chosen blog. Rocket science, right. 😀 (Okay, I typed a paragraph so I can test a smiley face.)
Both apps make it easy to add tags to posts - think it's called labels in Blogga Pro - and as we know, tags are vital on the internet for several reasons I'm too lazy to mention now. I would have liked it if the two apps could automatically suggest some tags, but since they don't, one has to think about what you typed, then type out tags to describe it. Damn, that takes another 40 seconds of one's limited time alive.
There's another unofficial app for Blogger too on Google Play, called BlogIt, which I tried some years ago. It sucked back then, and from the ratings and comments there it appears it's still family of a vacuum cleaner. So I haven't checked it out again today.
This post was just a quick comparison of the two blog apps Blogga Pro (which will remain my default) and the official Blogger app. The classy Mercedes S-class from the 1980's / early 1990's on top of the article is only to test photo insertion and so on. Oh, and also because it's still one of the best cars ever built.
Here's another beauty:
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