Fingers Crossed: Google Voice May Be Returning To The App Store

techcrunch.com

19 points·px··4 comments

I kind of doubt that the real Google Voice (i.e. the GV app from Google) will ever make an appearance in the app store. Same with the free maps navigation. I feel like Google might want to hold on to those as differentiators for Android.

But even third-party GV apps would make a lot of people very happy, including Arrington for one.

While that might make sense for some companies, it would be a bit backwards for Google. Android is used as a means of getting users to use their services (Google Voice, Google Maps, etc). As such, restricting app use to attract users to Android would be like restricting google.com to only run on Chrome to promote their browser.

My fear, though, is that Google consideres web apps better than 'regular' apps - this is apparent in their decision to integrate VOIP into GMail instead of releasing their Google Voice app that had been in use internally for some time:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/exclusive-video-of-unreleas...

This is unfortunate because, although web apps will do in a pinch, they really are second-class citizens on the mobile platform, unable to run as fast or have access to the system APIs that native apps get, and if Google Voice truly wants to replace my dialer I need it to work even when my data connection craps out.

If your data connection craps out then the native dialer won't even work.

Let's hope this is true. The main thing that iPhone is missing is a native gmail app and native google voice app. Apple needs to stand aside and let the best app win.

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