Google Voice on the iPhone: Webapp or Jailbreak

Monday, December 28, 2009

Google Voice is alive! After Apple punted the Google Voice app many diehard Google fans have been seeking a way to continue to use the glorified call forwarding application on their iPhone. AT&T is not happy about this turn of events. They reportedly were behind the rejection by Apple, citing increased (unpaid, oh my!) use of their backbone to route the calls Google Voice manages. So now along comes news that two developers have taken things in two directions to try and do an end run around Apple and AT&T, albeit in scaled down methods. It remains to be seen if they shall succeed.

The first one is Voice Central. Voice Central’s developers decided to morph it into a WebApp. It’s called “Black Swan” and lets you do pretty much everything you would expect from a Google Voice client. They claim it would still have the feel & look of a native application. It should be ready by next year sometime but by then maybe something better will have already come along. They even have a dramatic video preview:

It has some of the inherent downsides of being a webapp however, as you will have to upload your contacts to their server if you want to access them from the interface. That gets dangerously close to the Motorola/Sidekick territory. Storing contacts in the cloud could lead to devastating results.

Second there is Google Voice Mobile or GVMobile which has now been released in a 2.0 version. Apparently the original GV Mobile worked fairly well however it seemed clunky and buggy at times. Boy Genius is reporting that 2.0 is much more refined and polished than the previous version…“We’re really excited to tell you about it, too. It has been polished and refined — it had an injection of features — and we love using it, even in its non-final and beta form. For starters, dialed calls connect almost instantly, your iPhone contacts and favorites are accessible right within the app, there’s voicemail transcription viewing, and even multiple Google Voice account support. Advanced features like call forwarding phones, do not disturb settings as well automatic syncing, and even Growl support are on the to-do list.”

Available for jailbroken iPhones for free on Cydia soon this permutation of Google Voice was actually in the Apple app store before being pulled.

So for the advanced iPhone user, these work arounds for Google Voice may be a godsend. However, just because it is Google does not necessarily mean it is good. Does anyone else wonder what their monopoly will do for the computing masses? For the rest of us average users, Skype works pretty slick. Pretty soon phone numbers are going to seem antiquainted anyway.

This is a cool iPhone apps post by The App Machine.