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Comment by notyourwork | Hacker News Reader

The longer this goes on the more I try to iteratively decouple myself from google. For those with a google voice number, any suggestions on best choice for porting your number elsewher?

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One of the only reasons I'm still with Google Voice is because having your number with them mitigates (far as I can tell) SIM swap attacks. Yeah, someone can swap my SIM, but effectively nothing goes to the carrier number, just the GV number, which is much harder to socially engineer (even if some of that is because it's impossible to get someone on the phone).

If you tightly lock down your GV account, it should be much more difficult to compromise than a random cell carrier. I don't know if there's a comparable service, but I'm dying to pay for one, if only to not have a single point of failure.

I’m quite happy with GV for my 2FA except for the fact that some banks refuse to deliver messages to it.

Yeah you nailed the reason that I still use them as my primary number. The problem is who knows if they will kill voice. It just seems random when they decide to kill products. I imagine that they have some kind of scorecard for apps, but it's a precarious place to be that your primary number sits with a product that could be killed on a whim. I agree with you, I would pay in a heartbeat for a service that I knew was going to stick around.

This is the stickiest thing I've got by far. It is so nice to have a "front" phone number with SMS (and sometimes MMS) capabilities & voicemail capabilities that can be used from a web browser. If I thought that Google was capable of selling me the service as a valued customer rather than the product, I'd be happy to pay for it.

I've looked around at a few possibilities and narrowed it down to two I intend to try:

* https://jmp.chat/ plus maybe http://getkaiwa.com/ -- on the fiddly side, but with great fiddliness comes great flexibility, maybe?

* https://www.openphone.co/ -- seems more turnkey

https://jmp.chat/ supports both MMS and group texting, so it would give you the full Google Voice feature set. I'm not aware of any other service like this that supports group texting - most other services silently ignore group texts, so just be aware of that.

There's also https://wiki.soprani.ca/VonageSetup if you want to host the alternative yourself (though it doesn't support group texting).

I use dialpad.

The service isn't free but the call quality is far better than Google voice and you can text from your number with an app on your phone or computer.

I guess the guys who created grandstation (what turned into Google voice) started this company.

Isn’t dialpad much older than google voice? I remember using it for free, with my dialup connection, to call relatives in the US. Early 2000s

If you have a newer phone with esim you can port to a carrier that supports esim.

Twilio, possibly.

As someone who tried this, it's problematic - no support for group texts and iffy support for MMS attachments. I really wanted it to work, but occasionally even my 2FA codes would just not arrive.

When did you try it and what did you try?

Approx a year ago, ending maybe six months ago.

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