I've been a Google Voice user for 6-7 years. It became more important to me 5 years ago when I moved to the UK and ported my mobile number to GV.
It's not been very pretty. We were thrown a lifeline with the Google Hangouts app taking over for the absolutely-awful Google Voice app.
One of the most frustrating things about GV is that for certain SMS providers, it fails the "is this a USA number test" or "can we SMS to it" test (it's unclear which), thus making it not work with my USA bank accounts, and I can't register for Lyft, for example.
I wish they'd fix this, but what I really wish is that they'd make it a real product, make it cost a few bucks a month, and have a team working on it.
I was actually quite annoyed by the cheeky little "tee hee it's been 5 years + plus emoji" talking about their total lack of updates (both software, and well, actual communication around the service). It just comes across as contempt for the customer. Doubly so when they then throw everything into confusion at the end of the post by hinting that Hangouts may or may not be the future, and perhaps we should switch back?
Are there any good alternatives? What I need is to be able to receive texts from within the USA, be able to access via mobile app and the web, and have voicemail service.
> One of the most frustrating things about GV is that for certain SMS providers, it fails the "is this a USA number test" or "can we SMS to it" test (it's unclear which), thus making it not work with my USA bank accounts, and I can't register for Lyft, for example.
> I wish they'd fix this, but what I really wish is that they'd make it a real product, make it cost a few bucks a month, and have a team working on it.
I agree with this, especially the SMS part.
> I was actually quite annoyed by the cheeky little "tee hee it's been 5 years + plus emoji" talking about their total lack of updates (both software, and well, actual communication around the service). It just comes across as contempt for the customer.
Interesting. I did not read it that way. I read it more as them being a bit humble.
> Interesting. I did not read it that way. I read it more as them being a bit humble.
I definitely read it as snark rather than humble. Humble would have been something like "We're sorry we went so long without an update but we are committed to fixing this and supporting this app going forward. Thank you for your loyalty and patience." Instead, this was more like "Oh, you people are still here? Huh."
Agreed, definitely came off as snark. As a GV user myself, paying might I add, my initial reaction to seeing that little emotion/comment was also disgust.
I just ran into the "this isn't a phone number" issue with Telegram this morning. It claims my Google Voice (well really Project Fi now) number is a VOIP number, so I can't use it :(.
I ran into the same thing. From what I've read, Telegram use to take VOIP numbers, but not anymore. So there are older users who still have their Google Voice number attached to Telegram but new users cannot.
I suspect this is due to the NIST report about using VOIP/SMS for 2-factor was not secure (which is true. They can be spoofed).
I've also worked for a teleco that, in the case of getting an SMS for a ported number, would just send that SMS to ALL the other national providers in that country. We used relays for the other providers that would just drop the message if it didn't belong to them. My first job was actually to fix that by doing a ported number lookup and sending SMSs to only the provider it was ported to.
So is literally every phone number in the US for the past ten years. SIP replaced traditional trunking completely a decade ago. Cellphones have been using digital backend since 3G (though the voice transmission was still analog, for some value of analog)
There is a difference between a number managed by a traditional carrier using VOIP and a number from a free/low cost VOIP provider, especially when you are using text verification as a anti-spam measure.
>We find that miscreants rampantly abuse free VOIP services to circumvent the intended cost of acquiring phone numbers, in effect undermining phone verification. Combined with short lived phone numbers from India and Indonesia that we suspect are tied to human verification farms, this confluence of factors correlates with a market-wide price drop of 30-40% for Google PVA until Google penalized verification from frequently abused carriers
I also switched from Voice to Fi and it's technically a VoIP number transferred to the Fi MVNO... Not sure why that fails the VoIP test, I'm paying for normal phone service but it's not legit enough???
Not being able to text non-US phone numbers from Google Voice is my number one issue with the service.
Living in the US, when I receive an occasional text from my distant family members in Europe, I can't text a reply, I can't call right now (because of the timezone difference), and I can't email (some of them don't have email).
You might want try the RWG Mobile app [1][2]. Although I have only used it within the UK, they appear to give you a real number rather than VOIP number. I'm not sure if this applies to the US or Canada, but you could check with them.
One of the main reasons I started using the app was because it was the only one I could find that could successfully receive 2FA SMSs. Another reason was because EE hadn't yet enabled Wi-Fi Calling for my phone (Nexus 6P) and I needed a way to receive text messages over Wi-Fi since the 2G/3G reception is really poor where I work.
Being able to centralise voicemail [3] across multiple devices is also quite useful.
Same here. I moved my number when I left the US four years ago. I'm back State side, but don't really want to port the number back to a "real" provider, but I've found some services now won't send 2FA messages to Google Voice (or any VOIP numbers for that matter).
It's not been very pretty. We were thrown a lifeline with the Google Hangouts app taking over for the absolutely-awful Google Voice app.
One of the most frustrating things about GV is that for certain SMS providers, it fails the "is this a USA number test" or "can we SMS to it" test (it's unclear which), thus making it not work with my USA bank accounts, and I can't register for Lyft, for example.
I wish they'd fix this, but what I really wish is that they'd make it a real product, make it cost a few bucks a month, and have a team working on it.
I was actually quite annoyed by the cheeky little "tee hee it's been 5 years + plus emoji" talking about their total lack of updates (both software, and well, actual communication around the service). It just comes across as contempt for the customer. Doubly so when they then throw everything into confusion at the end of the post by hinting that Hangouts may or may not be the future, and perhaps we should switch back?
Are there any good alternatives? What I need is to be able to receive texts from within the USA, be able to access via mobile app and the web, and have voicemail service.