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Comment by cmgarcia | Hacker News Reader

I thought the only reason given for rejecting Google Voice was that it would cause confusion with Apple's dialer? If they did announce Google Voice along with VoIP, there would be some backtracking, I'd imagine.

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Did Apple ever explain how the GV dialer was more prone to confusion with Apple's offering than the Skype/everyother voip app one?

I don't think we've actually seen any screenshots of how the GV app was supposed to work.

Well a dialer is just a number pad from where you dial numbers, no? Maybe I misunderstand the objection then.

I assumed that due to Google's special access to the iPhone, the app was a little more far-reaching than the screnshots that are a sibling to you seem to show. That's also what Apple's announcement implied to me.

Google doesn't have special access to the iPhone, they use the same SDK as everyone else with the exception of a couple of private APIs though that's fairly common.

http://daringfireball.net/2008/12/private

Yeah, that's the 'special access' I was talking about. Apple tends to reject other people's apps for using private APIs, but they let Google get away with it.

Actually, only blatant violations are rejected. There are a lot of apps out there that make use of a few private API calls so I wouldn't say that Google has "special access."

screenshots: http://www.iphonefreak.com/2009/03/gv-mobile-google-voice-ip...

Ah, thank you. I never saw those.

Those aren't actually screenshots of Google's Google Voice app, it's one of the third-party ones that has since been pulled.

I have GV Mobile Premium (the one pictured) and like it quite a bit. Having used it I find it hard to belive that someone would be confused between it and the native iPhone dialer - it's just not that similar.

Last I heard [mid-Sept]: Apple said that "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google." Seems sketchy... [http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10356432-265.html?tag=mnco...]

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