Google Voice was rejected in July of 2009. In October of 2009 AT&T unilaterally (maybe after seeing how the FCC was thinking) amended their customer agreements to allow VOIP over the cellular network. Once that camel nose came under the tent the difference between VOIP phones and the builtin phone started to go away. Now in March of 2010 Line2 has been altered and accepted to deliver VOIP on the cellular network.
As submitted, Google Voice had several problems, including a massive privacy violation that would have held up any app. It is reasonable to think that they could have worked through those. The "duplicates the dialer, voicemail, and SMS" seems to be the key objection that Google could not, or chose not, to work around, but at least for voice calls that is changing as evidenced by Line2. I never saw SMS come up explicitly, but surely AT&T would not be happy to see that cash cow vanish. The question is if they had enough foresight and clout to get it protected in their agreement with Apple.
And, at least if you believe the statements to the FCC, AT&T has never had anything to do with the acceptance or rejection of the Google Voice app. So Apple ends up looking rather hypocritical here, when all of it's stated reasons for rejecting Google Voice also apply to Line2's app and yet that app was accepted.
Not true. Line2 was wifi only and was positioned as an additonal line, not a replacement.
I think the prevailing meme is clearly missing something. Like, why did google quit instead of addressing the flaws. Apple stated officially on the record that google voice was not rejected, in december, did google get discouraged and give up? Are they still in queue? Are they happier with a reason for people to buy android phones than fir iPhone users to be able to have convenient access to their google voice accounts?
Did people even want a native google voice app for anything other than subverting their voice/SMS contract? I use google voice, and I'd like a native voicemail viewer for it, but I don't need to replace my SMS program or dialer.
I'm not disputing that Line2 was originally wifi only. That's not relevant though, since Apple didn't complain about Google Voice using the 3g network to initiate calls in its FCC statement. From the TC article linked above:
"When [you get a] call, the service can either relay the call to your ‘real’ number (the AT&T number assigned to your iPhone), or it can send it to voicemail, depending on the way you’ve set up your call filters."
This is exactly what Google Voice does, and Line2 even included a similar "visual voicemail" feature from the start. It also duplicated the iPhone's dialer pixel for pixel. In Apple's FCC statement the stated reasons for Google Voice's rejection were re-routing of voicemail, duplication of "visual voicemail," and duplication of the iPhone's native dialing functionality.
Is there a claim in the FCC statement against the Google Voice app that doesn't also apply to Line2's app?
And Google didn't address the flaws, because there were no flaws to address! As the acceptance of the Line2 app makes clear, all of Apple's stated complaints about GV weren't real, so why try to get around them when the app will just be rejected for some other completely ridiculous reason?
