Blizzard Battle.net app for Android

Blizzard Entertainment published Blizzard Battle.net, a new application for Google's Android operating system recently.

The new application focuses on communication more than anything else. You may use it to chat with your Battle.net friends, to manage friends, invite new friends and do other friend and chat related things using the application.

One of the shortcoming of Blizzard's Battle.net service up until now was that it did not support a mobile application to chat with friends while on the go or away from the desktop computer.

Valve's Steam has had this for a while for instance, and it was a much requested feature by Battle.net customers to get something similar for the platform.

The Blizzard Battle.net application offers two main features: chat with friends, and manage friends. One of the interesting features of the application is the ability to add friends locally using QR Codes.

You can display your invite code on your device, and have others scan it using the Blizzard Battle.net application to befriend you.

Other features of the application include options to see which games your friends are playing right at the time. It is handy as you can see when friends are playing games, and you can use the application to message these friends to let them know if and when you plan on joining them.

The application requires an active Internet connection for most of its functionality. It does keep a record of the chat history and notifications however, and makes them available even if friends are offline or unavailable at this point in time.

The application requires a Battle.net account obviously to sign in, and will run on any Android device with version 5.0 of the operating system or higher.

A couple of features are missing right now which would improve the application significantly. It is not possible to change the display language in the application for instance, and there is no option to sort friends by online or offline status. While the latter may only be necessary if you have more than a dozen or so friends, it should be there from the get go.

Note that Blizzard has not integrated authenticator functionality into the application yet. This means that you still need to use the Blizzard Authenticator application for Android if you use it if you protect your account with this extra level of security. The company's other Android applications -- Wow Legion Companion, World of Warcraft Armory and Starcraft WCS -- are also not integrated but available as standalone applications.

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