Apple and Google: A Lovers' Quarrel. - July 29th, 2009

Recently, I posted about the kibosh Apple put on Google’s Voice app for the iPhone, leaving it a web-app like Latitude. It turns out, Latitude itself was also meant to have its own native app, which was summarily put to death as Voice’s was. I’m seeing a great deal of ranting and raving about AT&T’s supposed hand in Voice getting blocked as a native app, but not nearly so much a ruckus has been raised about Latitude suffering the same fate. Honestly, it looks to me more like Apple flexing a bit, since advanced features for their phone would ideally be their domain, not Google’s.

I think people tend to forget that AT&T is not the only carrier that Apple deals with, and that the US isn’t the only country in which the iPhone is sold. AT&T has always played second chair to Apple in the deal, and Google Voice has absolutely zero significant threats to wireless carriers hidden within it. Many of the rants floating around are written by people who don’t even have a Google Voice account yet, and seem to be basing conjecture on more conjecture, while piling rumor on top of that. The fact is that there are no facts, because nobody ruffling feathers about this mess are the people who know what’s going on. That would be the execs at Apple.

[UPDATE]: The FCC is very interested in knowing, too.

[UPDATE]: AT&T has stated they were not involved in the decision.

You are still able to use Google Voice on your iPhone. I have it, and I use it, all with a web-app. It’s not that bad, really.

If there has been any truly informative insight into just what is going on between the three industry giants, it would be the deleted tweet that came from the hand of Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search at Google. In it, she linked to a satirical (and hilarious) news article posted at BBspot, which told a story of Google turning the tables on Apple and removing them from their search index. The reasons given were meant to mirror Apple’s statement on deciding to block Google Voice’s native iPhone app, as well as Latitude’s.

While the article is purely satire, there was one particular bit of truth buried within it that many people are overlooking: The Google Voice application is still available for Blackberry and Android phones. This fact alone, considering iPhones in no way make up the majority of AT&T’s phone market, goes to show how flawed the argument is that AT&T is responsible for the block.

Why Google Voice is not such a threat to AT&T:

I’m going to use my own experience as a guide here, I know that’s not usually preferable, but in this case I seem to be one of few who actually use the service I’m blogging about.

• Texting: When I receive a text, I still receive the text, otherwise, I’d never know anyone texted me. It still counts against me come billing time. There are no less than 41 billion SMS and MMS texting apps available on the Appstore at any given time. Many of them have the ability to send text messages as data, but just like with Google Voice, the phone gets alerted via text upon receipt. Nothing new here.
• Calls: The way phone calls work on Google Voice is that you are connected through your Voice number, which means you are still connecting via your wireless connection to an actual phone number. Google Voice is not a VOIP service, and doesn’t even have the option while on a computer. It’s a number mask, a relay, a switchboard, a log and a transcription service. It’s not Skype.
• Long Distance Calls: I don’t know about the rest of you, but my AT&T account comes with free long distance calling, and it’s the cheapest account available. International rates are cut-cost with Google Voice, but there are already countless services set up for relay-calling international numbers at low rates, so this is not new.

What is new here is the fact that if Voice were given its own native app on the iPhone, then the two components of the device that make it a phone would suddenly be replaced with Google software. This wouldn’t affect AT&T much, but it would certainly upset Apple, whose software is being replaced. Right now, in order to use Voice, I basically have Safari open all the time, which isn’t a hassle since it already is anyway, due to GMail’s web-app being nicer than my phone’s onboard mail handler. That alone is a big hint. If a Google user like myself finds a simple web-app more useful than Apple’s software, then just how hard would it be for me to replace the Phone and Text buttons with a single GVoice icon should there be an actual app available?

The answer to that is that it’d be very easy, since that functionality is built into the phone. In fact, I’ve gone ahead and replaced the icons anyway, with home-screen Safari bookmarks for Google Voice and GMail. I don’t make any outgoing calls using the phone’s dialer, I simply dial out from the contact lists in my Voice web-app. Those contact lists are constantly sync’d with my GMail contact lists, which in turn are sync’d to my phone’s address book which in turn sync’s my Mac’s address book every time I plug my phone in. The system is pretty streamlined, and it’s nearly completely Google-driven except for, believe or not, a Microsoft Exchange service going on in there, but that shows how Google remains non-biased in their workarounds to get a product to the user. Since “the user” happens to be “Me” that makes me happy.

I strongly suggest that you actually try Google Voice before you believe anything someone else has written about it, including myself. As with any other service, it’s going to come down to personal preference in the end. I love it. I think it’s worth the slightly extra bit of work I go through to make phone calls or send text messages. But that’s me, I also like my freedom to use it, and admire Google for planning ahead and supplying me with a web-app the way they have. This stuff is free and they’re going great lengths to make sure it’s available. And after everything is laid out on the table, with Latitude’s absolutely senseless app-murder, it just doesn’t make sense to place the blame on AT&T anymore.

This looks like a simple case of lovers’ quarrel.