Its finally here. Google voice service from a simple HTML5 Web app is now available as a native app for the iPhone. The app features Cheap rates for international calls Free text messaging to U.S. numbers Voicemail transcription Display your Google Voice number as caller ID when making calls In addition to these features, you can turn on push notifications, so the app pings you the moment a new voicemail or text lands, which the web app never did. Calls go out over Direct Access Numbers now, so they dial quicker, and it reads your iPhone contacts so you dont have to type numbers in.
Its free and needs iOS 3.1 or later. Its not VoIP either, when you dial it hands you over to the regular Phone app and the call goes out on your carrier minutes. Bad news for us though. Google Voice is still a US only service, so unless you have a spare US number theres not much here yet.
And the wait?? Google submitted this thing about a year and a half ago and Apple sat on it long enough for the FCC to start asking questions about why it got rejected. Apple loosened its App Store rules in September and the app finally went through. Google says iPad and iPod touch support is coming later, so stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: macrumors.com, googlesystem.blogspot.com, techcrunch.com, venturebeat.com, fortune.com.
