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Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

I think it's ridiculous you have to have a Nexus phone to get this capability. Anyone with a Google account and Android should be able to get this functionality.

Right now with Google Voice I get a dozen hang up calls per day, it's always from a different number. When I don't answer, Ive got a dozen 2 second long voice mails. I used to spend a lot of time setting these to spam or being blocked, but between Google Voice and Hangouts simply asinine and beyond incompetent integration where some calls show up in Google Voice but not Hangouts and vice versa, I'm losing interest.

So recently I just decided to make the default behavior for the Google Voice number not ring any of my phones or Hangouts, but set up contact groups where friends and family should ring through. Well that's not working, I'm still getting spam and hangup calls, and some friends ring through, others don't, and client calls don't.

It's really craptastic.

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> I think it's ridiculous you have to have a Nexus phone to get this capability. Anyone with a Google account and Android should be able to get this functionality.

It's probably part of the Dialler app, which many other manufacturers replace with their own application.

It's because other manufacturers replace the Nexus dialer with their own app.

But you can download the Nexus dialer from the Play Store now: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

The app is only available to Nexus devices. If you try to load that page on a non-Nexus phone, the page will show an error indicating that it is "not compatible" with your device.

It shows as compatible with my Note 4 and installed fine.

Not compatible with my S6

It's worth what you pay for it.

That said they should charge me for more features! If it had pro features that worked for $35/year I'd do it.

It's not worth what I don't pay for it anymore. Nothing is worth this. Mosquito bites are free too, and also not worth it.

I'd pay $35 a year for the f'n basic features it has now to work as they should, but don't. I'd pay a one time fee of $35 to see Hangouts die a fast death.

Hangouts is terrible. It has caused me to stop using Gtalk. Facebook messenger works better.

> Right now with Google Voice I get a dozen hang up calls per day, it's always from a different number. When I don't answer, Ive got a dozen 2 second long voice mails.

I have exactly this problem too and I have no idea where they are coming from. I'm constantly waking up to 1 or 2 empty 2 second voicemails from random numbers. Sometimes a single number does it 2 or 3 times. I guess I an turn off voicemail, that is probably the only reasonable fix.

You don't, I've been using Truedialer happily. Now, on the iOS side, it's a different story since Apple doesn't allow third party dialer apps yet

Google Voice is a disaster. They are recycling numbers and many are from folks owing debts, so tons of collections companies call.

.. That's how phone numbers work.

My Google Voice, luckily, didn't have that problem (Grand Central era) - but my new T-Mobile Cell phone number gets tonnes of crap calls.

I bet this is using the same information as the builtin spam protection in Google Voice.

You can recreate it using any VOIP provider with whitelisting.

AFAICT, Alphabet gave up on google voice. It makes me a little nervous that's my main number. I imagine i'll soon have to roll my own thing with twilio.

Although the gv voice prompt "state your name" seems to help immensely.

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