LinkedIn staked its claim as the business social network quite some time ago. A major revamp to LinkedIn's mobile apps now brings much needed visual and functional changes to the service. The result is an Android app that looks spiffier and is easier to use. LinkedIn remains a valuable free service, and I recommend every adult with career aspirations have an account and cultivate a network with care and consideration. The LinkedIn Android app is not perfect, but it's worth having if you are an avid LinkedIn user.

View All 8 Photos in Gallery

This review specifically refers to the LinkedIn Android app. For notes on what's different for iOS users, see PCMag's review of LinkedIn for iPhone. And for more details about the service at large, see our review of LinkedIn.com.

LinkedIn Android App Design and Features
LinkedIn's new mobile interface has a much more energetic look than previous versions. You'll notice more colors that pop against LinkedIn's signature shade of blue, as well as updated icons.

Along the top are buttons for home, your profile, messages, connections, and search, as well a grid icon that opens a menu showcasing other apps from the company. That one feels a little cheeky because it's nothing more than a promotional menu recommending the apps Job Search, Pulse, SlideShare, Lynda.com, and Lookup. It's a poor use of a prominent spot that would be better taken up something more important to users, such as a link to the settings menu.

Settings are an integral part of any online service, and in LinkedIn's Android app, they're awfully hard to find. They're rather mysteriously hidden in your profile page behind a cog icon. Within the settings are three additional sub-menus for Account, Privacy, and Communication. All these sections contain really important tools for customizing the app and having a positive user experience. They really ought to be a part of the main navigation bar. For example, consider how many taps it takes to find the notifications options: Profile > Settings > Communications > Push Notifications. Unless you're purposefully exploring the app, you'll have a hard time finding these important tools.

If you appreciate a good endorphin hit from noticing people are interested in you online, you'll love the new Profile page that shows how many profile views you've had recently and how many people saw the most recent item you shared. Premium LinkedIn users see advanced details on who looked at their Profile page and when. For more information on what's included in Premium and whether it's worth the price, see the full review of LinkedIn.com.

The Messages page makes good use of screen real estate. On my OnePlus 2 phone, I could see seven messages in preview, including the date, the first few words of the message, and the sender's name and profile photo. This gives users on the go a lot of information in a concise view so they can tend to messages that are important and get back to what they were doing.

Managing invitations to connect is actually easier to do on the Android app than on the full LinkedIn website. In the mobile app, your pending invitations appear in a long, scrolling list, and you can quickly tap an X or check mark next to each person to give them a yea or nay. In the website, you can only see a limited number of pending invitations at a shot, and refreshing the lot once you've accepted or rejected one takes longer than it should. The mobile experience is simply better for people who have let invitations build up.

Inviting new people to connect, unfortunately, is worse in the LinkedIn app. Tapping a button to invite someone to connect does, well, who knows what. Certainly not you. You don't see any preview of the message that will be sent or how the person will be communicated. Seeing as I dislike receiving canned messages to connect on LinkedIn, I feel awful when I send them myself. With the LinkedIn Android app, you don't even know you're sending them until it's too late. The website handles invitations nearly as badly, but if you take some time to learn the tricks of the site, you can eventually figure out how to send a customized invitation to connect. LinkedIn really needs to address this problem across its entire network.

If you need to find someone at a particular company or in a particular job role, the search bar is your best bet. Search for any term, and beneath it some generic filtering options appear to improve your results. For example, when I searched for the word "editor," the LinkedIn app asked if I was looking for job postings with that word or people with that position. Likewise, if you search for a known company name, you see immediate options to look for that company's page, people at the organization, or open positions at the company. Depending on the word you search, you might also see options to look for a school, LinkedIn group, or something else.

Advanced search tools are available, but they only appear after you complete an initial search, which might cause some confusion. I wish the option were visible from the start. Advanced search tools help you narrow the results by the closeness of your connection, location, companies, and industries.

A Top Android App, Despite Some Weaknesses
LinkedIn is as valuable a service as it ever was, and people who use it actively for job searches, recruitment, or other kinds of networking will appreciate and should use the new app. Push notifications and the redesigned Messages page in particular are designed for mobile users. The fact that the settings are so buried bothers me, especially because there's a perfectly good place to put them that's currently occupied by in-house advertisements. Still, for professionals who are trying to get ahead with their networking game, the LinkedIn mobile app is worth keeping on your Android phone.