That's about where I am with this. I got started with GV back when carriers were charging $0.25/each to send or receive texts, and eventually paid Google $20 to port my old AT&T number into their system.

Then Google stopped developing the GV app and I switched from iOS to Android to get the Hangouts Dialer integration. With the Hangouts integration instead of a real GV app, they apparently threw away the spam reporting/filtering (on voice and text) that had been one of its greatest features.

Eventually I got fed up with the poor service. Third parties would refuse to accept my phone number, or would accept it but couldn't actually send me messages. Group MMS didn't work properly. As of late 2013, they "integrated" MMS support with T-Mobile and Sprint. When one of them tried to send you a picture, you'd receive it as an email attachment on your gmail account. MMS from AT&T and Verizon users, as far as I can tell, continue to disappear into the ether.

I have no idea how many missed social calls I had from people in college organizing social lives via group texts that I never got, and they never knew I didn't get because there was zero indication on either end that it wasn't delivered.

As far as I'm concerned, Google Voice is dead. Maybe this reincarnation lasts two years before management decides to refocus on Duo/Allo, or maybe it's six months. Maybe they throw it out and go all-in on a new Project-Fi based VOIP/messaging system. Either way, I'm staying out of it.

My number's been ported to T-Mobile on the $30 prepaid unlimited plan, and I switched back to an iPhone. Voicemail transcriptions work just as well as GV's did, and my text messages don't just vanish anymore. Everything's great.

I was a die-hard Google user/fanboy until about a year and a half ago. I was a Fi user, Voice user (before Fi), Hangouts, Nexus buyer, you name it (I even had a Google TV and almost bought an OnHub). I bailed on it all when I realized that Google has absolutely no long-term vision or desire to support what they produce. I went to an iPhone and despite Apple's warts, it's a night-and-day experience. I'll never again trust Google products.

Frankly, I can't understand how Google is so chaotic. Perhaps it's the organization, which looks more like a conglomerate than a cohesive corporation with a clear vision.

They release products, only to abandon many of them without a clear reason (like Google Talk). Or they release two products that should be one instead (Android & ChromeOS, or Allo & Duo).

The Google Talk fiasco got me particularly disenchanted. A beautiful, open, standards-compliant product (they even helped extending XMPP with Jingle!) gets replaced by a proprietary mess like Hangouts.

It's the promotion system. People are incentivized to work 2y on a project, launch, get promoted, move on.

Coupled with no clear strategy other than "we need the next toothbrush" you get what you see.

"I think we could get them to brush their tongues."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brU_Pp-20g0

>> Frankly, I can't understand how Google is so chaotic.

I'd love an open and honest answer from someone up high in the org chart at Google on that. Better yet, just an acknowledgement of it and how they're going to stop doing this in the future. If they were a startup with 200 employees under the age of 30 I'd understand it, but they're obviously waaaaay beyond that stage.

Hell, at this point I would settle for some closure on "what the hell did you mean by 'more wood behind fewer arrows' in 2011 when you began the process of mass project shutdown?!... that's not really how arrows work :/".

More wood = bigger bow. Shoot fewer arrows harder, i.e. more resources behind fewer projects, i.e. quality over quantity.

THANK YOU! All of the other explanations I'd come across have thought they meant to shoot fewer, but heavier, arrows :/.

The real problem seems to be inability to aim. Google fired a ballista at Facebook with G+ and missed completely.

I read an essay on HN few weeks ago which said that the problem with G+ was that the higher mgmt at Google thought FB is famous because of a nicely designed product (rather than network effect), so they released a good product G+, it is somewhat a good product but it missed the train. Plus it has circles, it isn't intuitive.

I actually like G+ in principle. They already had the option to create a basic profile for your Google account which was good for those of us who already used Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Maps, etc. from them. I think they figured they had all of the pieces to make a "better Facebook" and compete in that space, but as you say, network effects are strong.

I know a ton of people who set up a G+ profile and I found both the web version and mobile app to be superior to Facebook's offering. Plus they had better image hosting and they had good text/video chat before FB updated theirs.

But in the end it comes down to critical mass of users (and particularly, non-early-adopters) on Facebook. You might get your other peers to try out a new service if you're into trying out new sites/services but unless you get everyone to make (and use) a profile the way most people seem to at least have a Facebook account, you're stuck maintaining two profiles on two sites and switching between them depending on who you want to share that update or photo or link with.

In the end it didn't matter if they had a modestly better site or mobile app because nobody wanted to post to two sites. And since, unlike email, these things don't operate on any sort of standard protocol, you can't just switch your client and let grandma keep using her old one so it fizzled as a FB competitor.

(I still use it for several niche interest groups though. Also I think circles are vastly superior to whatever Facebook has for granular control of who you share something with.)

Even I love G+ on principle, but that's the point, in principle. The problem with G+ goes deep, first of all, they just assumed that a network gets traction because of beautiful UI, it is not the case, if you look at facebook's growth, it started as a way to talk and later as a dev platform, because of farmville and games like that they get a lot of traffic, so essentially facebook means different things to different people.

When fb came into existence there wasn't much of a competitor to it, so they focused on making it easy to use and stuff, later, when g+ was being created they misread the entire picture. At that point fb had become a platform or was becoming a platform. Currently, FB has different users, some use it as a buy sell group, some for messenger, some for playing games (APIs) etc

g+ didn't focus on good things, just beautiful UI doesn't mean you win, you have to differentiate yourself, they should have gone this way, start a private beta, build a terrific API for developers, so devs will flock to your platform and build apps on it, plus the circles stuff, it is great for geeks like us, but not so much for my grandma, who doesn't even know what google means. Plus, g+ takes an awfully large amount of time to load on slow network. Overall. Plus they don't have an end vision.

Yeah the smart thing would have been to acknowledge that you arent FB and dont need to be FB and to focus on areas that are underserved rather than trying to semi repeat what they have done

People high up are aware of it; nobody seems competent enough (at management) to do anything about it.

They don't care. You as a user (for Google) ain't a customer, you're the product. This is most starkly clear in their customer service. Most of their free products don't even have one and refer to the Google forums. Meanwhile AdWords, AdSense etc. customer service is top notch.

What pisses me off most is that there is no clear alternative if you want to keep your data portable between multiple brands/devices. Microsoft often works poorly. Apple only works on Apple. The alternative is a hodgepodge of services (SimpleNote, HERE maps, EverNote, etc) that requires tons of accounts.

You underestimate how stultifying size can be. When I was at Google, pretty much everyone cared about how the internal incentives were screwed up. There were a lot of attempts at changing structure of promotion and career development, but nobody knows how to do it. To be fair, I'm not aware of any entities of that size who don't have the same problem of with balancing the need for centralization with keeping bright workers motivated and growing.

Why not just place a product manager above each product (Gmail, YouTube, Play Music, etc. etc.) that each report to the master manager who's only job is basically to unify all the services and make them work together in a nice way. He would be the one to force everyone to use the same animations, same icons, same conventions etc.. honestly I never understand how companies with millions of dollars can't come up with the simple fix of 'give an experienced person total authority'.

People lower down are aware of it too. It's bonkers.

The one-two punch of killing Google Talk and Google Reader in quick succession really hurt my confidence in Google. (Wave too, to a lesser extent.)

Wave I still miss. It was like it didn't go gangbusters straight away so google binned it off. Any it only didn't work because of the stupid JS hijacked chat scroller, where was its promise as a new chat protocol.

I've said before that there is probably an interesting alternate universe out there was G+ was built on top of Talk, Reader, and Wave instead of replacing those three. They really did throw out several babies in trying to throw out their over-silo-ed bathwater. One can only imagine the world in which the UX work applied to the G+ walled garden Facebook clone effort had instead been used to polish (a federation-capable) Wave and make it a consumer friendly product...

Stupid theory: It is fun working on projects, it is not fun supporting projects.

Putting together what a bunch of different people have said, it's not just this (although it's this too). It's that you get promoted by producing a high profile, popular product. After which you've been promoted and you're working on something else, and so the product you got promoted for gets neglected, languishes for a bit and then dies.

The problem with this idea is that once the project becomes a product or services of Google's, then it is supported by official paid working hours of its employees.

This: "they release two products that should be one instead (Android & ChromeOS)"... I've been thinking the same exact thing. Google basically split the ecosystem in half...devs have to unnecessary build seperate apps for each (unless they are using a cross platform engine).

Not really... chromeos is the bare minimum linux environment to run a chrome browser on laptop hardware. Android is some frankenstein of java IDE to develop phone software.

They might-should-be the same, but they're fundamentally very different roots.

I'm going to take a slightly controversial point of view and say: Android should have been ported to chromeos.

Newer phones should've shipped with the ping-pong update system, and the secure permissions system that permeates Linux.

Instead we're left with, what is really 75% a hack, Android. The update system sucks. The "recompiling" of app sucks. The permissions system sucks. The bloat really sucks. I am pretty sure my Nexus One was more responsive than my last Nexus phone, or any of the competition (which also, despite Google's best (awful) efforts have deviated in user experience greatly).

Google, once a golden god of the entire computer/software industry has fallen so far. It's really depressing. I wonder if it is even possible for a business to succeed the way Google used to and be profitable.

It's only a matter of time before someone eats their lunch, just the same as Microsoft. In 15 years $COMPANY will dominate and we'll be in the same spot.

Actually, I'm agreeing with you... Google never really should have done Android but rather skipped directly to making Chrome OS for phones.

A major tenant of Chrome is the rolling update model, nobody has ever got the android vendors to do anything slightly like that. My Moto E gen2 got 1 year of updates that's it.

Back at the time phones hadn't scaled up enough. Remember how horrid early android (and iphones) were? I actually skipped the first generation entirely (and only got my first smart phone because it would be better than my existing phone and have GPS navigation as it's killer app).

If chromeOS is the native eco, why is everyone talking about rolling chrome into Android and not the other way around?

Because Android is the big dog. Android can and very well may eat the world. It's a very easy distro to abuse.

Chromeos on the other hand is a very well-thought-out distro that is extremely simple and low-level, enough that it could easily form the basis of a great OS like Android

That is the bane of a large company. A product that would've been successful user-count-wise and revenue-wise for a smallish startup starts looking like a failure when you operate in billions of users and tens of billions of revenue.

It's not that someone internally calls it out as a failure, but the constant pressure to compete for scarce resources (department budgets and developers in Google's case) encourages the internal politicking and resource wars. If YouTube or Search or Android is considered top priority at the moment, it's very unlikely some project like Google Voice or Google Talk have any kind of leverage in defending their budgets and/or teams.

Likely because of their "20% personal project time" policy.

As best I recall, ChromeOS started as a personal project to see if one could build a OS around a web browser (and Google already had one handy).

On top of this Android didn't start within Google. And Rubin ran it as his own fief. Supposedly he insisted that all Android devices come equipped with a mobile radio, and thus Google would not certify WiFi only tablet devices.

A lot of other companies have this policy (Google didn’t invent it) and aren’t in that kind of mess.

I just switched from an iPhone to Android; there are pros and cons to both platforms. But one of the cons of the Apple ecosystem is how terrible all their (cloud) services are.

I still haven't fully bought into the Google ecosystem but I'm slowly move over.

I'd be interested to hear what issues you have with Apple's cloud services. I, personally, have had no problems, but am definitely curious.

One issue is how they nickel and dime you for storage space. I think you only get 5GB free and then have to "upgrade your icloud plan" even after dropping $800+ on a new phone, which you might want to back up.

Ah. I thought terrible meant "issues using the service." I do have some annoyances with how I'm charged for things, but I don't mind paying for services ($2/month for 200GB) that give me things without resorting to selling my browsing habits to the highest bidder.

5GB is actually enough for most people backing up their phones. The OS, Apps, Music, Books etc don't count towards that 5GB number.

The issue is if you take a lot of photos that you will want to upgrade. But it is a small amount.

Photo sharing doesn't seem to count towards your storage limits either...

It's not free. You must own an iDevice or a Mac to use iCloud and worse if you pay for one device you get 5gig. If you pay for 2 you don't get another 5gig

Importing thousands of pictures from my honeymoon lead to tons of duplicates. I tried to consolidate the library and a bunch got deleted. Luckly I backed up everything but I know not to fully trust apple.

The state of the phone is not synced in iCloud, its backed up into iCloud, which is not the same thing. That means if you have multiple phones, once you install a phone from another's phone backup you will have two diverging states.

Various features like "auto install apps I installed on other devices" want to hide this away, but they fail. For example, they will install apps I installed on another device, but they won't install them in the same position on the screen (something very important for me), and they won't delete it.

Also many apps, including apps made by Apple, do not use iCloud to store their settings and data, or use it inconsistently (e.g. only for data, but not for settings). One spectacular example is the messaging app, which doesn't show SMSs received on all devices (although it shows SMSs received on other devices before I made the backup, making it even more confusing). Of course, the messaging app shows iMessages. So some messages work, but others don't.

i would not trust any apple service to host/preserve my images. just have had way too many instances where images just disappear. and afaik they still haven't really explained the connection between all the celebrity phones being hacked when they were all using icloud (if someone has a link that'd be nice)

Yes Apple did explain what happened.

http://www.apple.com/pt/pr/library/2014/09/02Apple-Media-Adv...

Whilst there was a security issue in iCloud it wasn't the root cause behind the "fappening" scandal. It was purely social engineering.

To add to this, Apple also doesn't bother to make it clear to users that there are limitations to backing up their photos using iCloud. You can get pictures out of Photo Stream whenever but that's only the last 1000 photos or 30 days. For Camera roll that actually stores the backup of all of your photos, you can only access your backup if you restore it to a new or reset device. If you get a new iPhone and don't immediately restore from iCloud then too bad, you either have to wipe your new iDevice or buy a new one in order to get to your backup.

I have a similar story.

Google really had momentum. They bungled it terribly. I just use an iPhone now. It works, no bloatware, no bullshit, no need for useless tweaks.

I should have switched years ago.

I am a Google Fi user, the Pixel is by far the best phone I have ever owned, and I have zero complaints so far. To contact customer service, if I ever need to, it takes less than 10 seconds. I almost always have service, if I don't have tower service I swap to WiFi and have the same and full capabilities. I dont have any issues as it stands, though I have been using Google products since 1997 and might be a bit of a fanboy... =P

You can contact customer service right now because they're promoting the heck out of Pixel, and are happy to sink lots of resources into it.

Once it becomes a legacy party of Google (hey, remember the original Pixel that Google made? The premium laptop that they no longer support at all? I own it.), chances are they'll drop all that support, just like everything else at Google.

Same happened to me a long time ago. This is kind of why I think "apple is dead" is a little early...

I've never had an eyePhone and switch to Android from Palm's WebOS. But for years I've always used 3rd party ROMS (Cyanogen mostly).

Google has a vested interest in not fixing Android's brokenness. They make a lot of money off phones that needs to be replaced every 2 years. With their strict control over OHA, they can easily mandate PC style platform standards to reduce e-waste, fight planned obsolescence and offer real security updates:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

But they don't. I feel like I'm through, but I don't want an Apple phone either. Ubuntu Mobile has no device support and Plasma only supports two devices (neither with an SDCard option). I wish we had real open hardware :(

>They make a lot of money off phones that needs to be replaced every 2 years.

No... they really don't. They make a lot of money off search traffic and the app store. Android licensing amounts to approximately $0.75 per handset. That's not even a rounding error on their balance sheet, and SURELY not something to "intentionally break android" over. Broken android is a great way to drive people to other platforms. There's nothing to be gained for them in that.

more to the point, why do you think they released the Pixel line-up? They got sick of vendors screwing up Android by skinning every premium handset on the market (and skins are the primary source of broken garbage). And in that endeavor they've been wildly successful. The pixel is by far the best android handset I've ever owned. You pay for it, but it's worth it if you like android.

And yet the Pixel is itself a custom skin of Android.

Google Assistant? Not available on my Nexus 5X, which I received less than a year ago. Search button behaves differently, Allo behaves differently, "night mode" removed Nexus 5X build and added to Pixel build.

I'm upset because I thought switching to a Google-designed Android phone would rescue me from fragmentation and give me access to the best, cleanest Android experience.

Then they released the Pixel and removed a feature from my phone and fragmented their own operating system's features to differentiate a new device.

That's not a custom skin... it's an app. And while I can understand complaining they didn't enable it on the 5x, if you REALLY want it, it's extremely easy to enable on a 5x.

I've used it exactly 1 time, and if my choices were a 5x or a Pixel and that was the only feature I cared about, I wouldn't spend the money in a million years to enable it.

Allo is useless to me, so I guess I don't really have any comments there. No desktop app? No multi-device? I'll stick with hangouts.

None of the things you mentioned would be worth upgrading for. And I REALLY don't think you're missing anything. The camera and the build quality are what make the pixel awesome. Assistant, night mode, and allo functioning slightly differently don't even enter into the equation on the price hike being justified.

Well it is a custom skin built into the Google App. I have the Nexus 6p and enabled it by making a change so my device identifies as a Pixel to Google. There was no additional software installed and that was all I did to enable it, make a small text change from "Nexus 6p" to "Pixel XL".

Okay, sure not off direct licensing of the OS. But total revenues are $31 billion. That's a significant number on their balance sheet.

http://www.androidauthority.com/how-does-google-make-money-f...

The Pixel doesn't have an sdcard slot, which is a deal breaker for me. (I don't rent my music, so I have a 200GB micosd card with my collection on it). Even their 128GB model simply won't cut it.

You're now making a completely different argument. You started out claiming they intentionally break android to force you to upgrade every 2 years. Now you're pointing out they make a ton of money off android from revenues and search... which is exactly what I said. And not at all what you said.

I'm not sure what to tell you on the sdcard slot or how it applies to the discussion. I simply said the Pixel is a clear example of the rest of the android ecosystem not living up to Google's expectations of a premium phone. There will NEVER be a phone that is all things to all people, if an sdcard is a dealbreaker for you, don't buy one. I think it's ridiculous to claim you need 200GB of songs on your phone, but that's your choice. Of course, google will let you upload 50,000 songs for free over google music, so even that excuse doesn't hold water, but I'm sure you'll find another reason to complain.

> Of course, google will let you upload 50,000 songs for free over google music, so even that excuse doesn't hold water, but I'm sure you'll find another reason to complain.

I mean, not OP here, but my music library is ~140 GB, and I don't think it's unreasonable to want to have that available without internet access. I run with a 64gb iPhone, so I'm definitely not the guy arguing for massive SD cards on everything, but I don't think you can say it's totally ridiculous to have a use case for that much storage.

They know what they are doing. The whole point is to get you to use their cloud services. But now, if you are a Project Fi user, they are charging for data access to your own content you upload to Play Music.

So now I am back to managing music files on my device and changing them out and feeling like I jumped 10 years back to the past.

Right, which is why in every google app they give you the option to cache songs offline, and set your phone to only play streaming music while on wifi. They're TOTALLY trying to get you to spend more on data - which they make basically nothing off of. That's as ridiculous as saying they intentionally break android to have you buy a new phone to make the whopping .75 per handset.

> They make a lot of money off phones that needs to be replaced every 2 years.

Someone is vested in making money every 2 years alright, but it's not Google - it's Qualcomm.

> With their strict control over OHA, they can easily mandate PC style platform standards to reduce e-waste, fight planned obsolescence and offer real security updates

Unfortunately due to Linux's intentional lack of a stable driver ABI, the ability to upgrade Android depends on Qualcomm's willingness to write drivers for old chipsets on newer kernel versions, but that is a rather unattractive proposition for Qualcomm since they want as much demand for their new chips as possible. Qualcomm is a member of the OHA, but they are effectively a monopoly and I doubt Google could push them around.

Qualcomm owns CDMA right? I think they require using their SoC if you're in the US on Verizon or Sprint and are on Android

'eyePhone'? Is there supposed to be some meaning behind that?

I suspect it's meant to be a reference to a Futurama episode and meant to denigrate Apple somehow?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GklO9RIj0JA

>I have no idea how many missed social calls I had from people in college organizing social lives via group texts that I never got, and they never knew I didn't get because there was zero indication on either end that it wasn't delivered.

That is what forced me away from GV a few years back. It is an unforgivable flaw of a communication product for messages to completely disappeared from the system without any party knowing. The fact that Google was comfortable with that flaw for years tells you all you need to know about their commitment to these kind of products. It will take years of updates like this before I start to believe that any renewed commitment will stick.

I'll send this along to the one friend I still know using Google Voice though. I'm sure he'll be excited, he was just complaining about something the other day and I was nudging him toward bailing.

With Google losing interesting in Voice and integrating it into Hangouts, then apparently losing interesting in Hangouts too, I'd been telling him that Voice was probably dead-dead.

I still use GV daily, but only for voice -- it's basically my craigslist number.

But it gets 4-5 spam calls a day. This varies greatly, and I block them regularly, but I wish I could just push a button and have it blocked while screening the call. My GV number is rather public, considered a business number, and is therefore on every spam list in the US.

I've been tempted to port the number over to my VOIP provider, but I don't really trust their SMS integration any more than Google's. And no call screening.

> I got started with GV back when carriers were charging $0.25/each to send or receive texts

What? Unlimited texting has been included in every phone plan I've ever had since the first iPhone or earlier, before Google Voice existed.

Unlimited SMS has been the norm for a little while now (5ish years maybe?), but it wasn't too long ago that the lower tier plans for every mobile carrier in the US (not sure about elsewhere) had a per text charge, possibly after hitting a low monthly limit on free texts, or possibly with no free texts at all.

> every phone plan I've ever had since the first iPhone

Exactly... You realize there was a time before then, right?

In the mid 2000s, texts cost between 10-20c to send, unless you bought a bundled plan, which weren't actually that common then, and even then you were limited to usually 200 texts/mo.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/aboutus/mission/viewpoint...

It's a little strange to read accounts like this. I've been using Voice continuously for years now, and ported my old number into it. There were a few years when it kinda sucked (yes, I also lost group/mms messages with no warning), but since the integration with Hangouts (2014? 2015?), I've been quite happy with it again: group messages work, pictures in messages work, etc. Hangouts isn't perfect and still has lots of missing features and annoyances, but it's been overall acceptable to me.

I do have two unusual situations that make Voice a good fit for me: I don't have reliable cell reception in my apartment (so texting and calling through wifi is really useful), and I'm on the T-Mobile $30 plan, so I have only 100 minutes on my "real" phone number (so I make as many calls as possible through gmail on my laptop). It's also really nice to use my regular phone number with no extra effort or roaming fees when traveling internationally.

I'm in a very similar situation, and overall have found GV to be a net positive despite the imperfections.

The only additional caveat I've found is that the proper carrier-level call forwarding to GV voicemail doesn't work with the $30 T-Mobile plan.

Right, as far as I understand it, several features are unavailable on T-Mobile pre-paid plans, including proper call forwarding, some voicemail things, and their cheap international roaming. It doesn't really bother me since I only ever give out my GV number. The only calls I get to my "real" number are wrong-numbers.

I wanted to do this, as I have the same situation: bad cell connection in the house. But the voice quality on Hangouts was so bad I had to give it up. The audio cuts out every few seconds, for example. This is sitting right next to the router with a Fios connection.

I had a GV as the primary in my resume for years. Last year, many recruiters emailed me that calls weren't going through with a recording stating "The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time". I asked in GV forums to not avail.

I don't know how many nice job opportunities I missed when hiring managers saw my application but could not call me back until I detected the issue.

Ended up switching everything to a new VoIP number I can control in my asterisk server. Only feature I miss is the speech-to-text on voicemails.

I still use my GV number for all recruitment. I hate actually taking calls so it works for me fine. I call back the ones I want to on my own time. ... I also hate recruiters. They're scum .. but that's another issue. /sorryrant

That recording isn't in Google Voice. Maybe you had a forwarding phone on your Google Voice account that was eating your calls. (Maybe you had an old one you forgot to take off, and someone else took over the number and it was doing that.)

I was told that by GV support, but I'm struggling to find any other likely source for it.

I removed all redirections from my GV number and tested:

- I called from my home and cellphone, both hangouts and GV ringed.

- I asked my family and friends to try the number and it worked fine.

- Then I asked a recruiter who was having trouble and he got the recording.

- Same recruiter called using his personal cellphone, it worked fine.

While speaking with this recruiter on a different line, I asked him to put his phone on speaker and try calling, I was able to hear him getting the recording...

I did all this before trying to contact google voice support. To me, it looks as thought GV is in denial there might be an issue on their side and refused to look into it.

I speculate there is something wrong in the way calls get routed to GV from certain providers, or some sort of spam caller filter is blocking recruiters who might have been wrongly reported as "telemarketers" by google voice users.

Edit: formatting and grammar

> I've already told all my friends to forget my Google Voice number.

Why didn't you migrate your GV number? That seems a lot less painful than telling everyone to update your contact information.

This is a nerve-wracking process as there's little to no feedback on how this process is progressing, but it does work! I migrated my Google Voice number, which was long since my primary, out of Google Voice over to my cell carrier about a year ago.

I have this problem at both places where I work, but with gmail. In both companies, the gmail account was registered under the business name (=paperwork name), but the trading name (=public name) is different. So you have to train your users to log in with the business name, even though that's the only time it's ever seen by anyone except the lawyers.

Then you have the problem of emails going out under that name instead of the trading name - while the aliases generally work well, you have to train users in setting their accounts properly. I've contacted gmail support about switching over names, but their response was "it'll take around three days, and you may not be able to access email for that time", sprinkled with a tone of "it'll probably work without a hitch".

Yeah, you try telling the business side staff that they might not have emails for three days in a busy place... unfortunately I was too spooked to proceed, so can't vouch that it works :)

I was never confident enough in Google Voice (because of the issues mentioned above) to port my AT&T number to Google Voice, so many people had both numbers for me.

I boosted my Google Voice number out of Google Voice and into T-Mobile.

Took like 30 minutes.

Secondly, the Google Hangouts app had effectively replaced Google Voice for years. I think picture messages worked there no problem.

I was thinking the same exact thing; didn't they say they were closing Voice down in favor of Hangouts awhile back? I freaking love Voice, but Google needs to make high-level internal decisions about which products will get long-term support no matter what, and which won't.

I have been using Google Voice/Hangouts for all my daily phone calls and SMS for 7 years now. Since switching from the Google Voice app to the Hangouts App, I have not had any major issues or complaints.

Did you you try the Google Hangouts App before ditching Google? I wonder if most of your problems stem from that.

EDIT: I just verified that I can sent/receive group MMS. It appears this feature has worked since at least 2014. Seems you missed the memo to migrated to Hangouts.

I'm assuming what happened is they used Google Voice to jumpstart Google Fi and left Voice around as a neglected old version which they actually kept supporting (whoo). Now Fi is settled they're turning their focus back to Voice.

no, they bought a company called Grand Central in 2007 and re-branded it as Voice. This was well before Fi. A couple of the key players from GC left to form Uber Conference in 2012 which was then rebranded as Dialpad with backing from Google Ventures.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/21/inventor-of-google-voice-n...

They also stripped out many of the amazing features from Grand Central and then left Google Voice to rot for years, slowly degrading.

How they handled Voice (and so many other services) has moved me from being a huge Google fan to someone who immediately starts looking for a replacement when Google buys a company whose services I use. It's almost a guarantee that they'll lose interest in running a service once something else new and shiny comes along.

Except that Fi leaves the really killer Voice features behind. You don't get texts or voice transcriptions emailed to you in Fi.

You do get them in hangouts (on the handset and in gmail on the web). I do get why you might want them via vanilla email, though.

The fact that their little update doesn't have a comments/feedback section - and the state of their GV product forum - still demonstrates that they don't take this seriously.

I ported my numbers away after running into so many issues where services would use my native phone number rather than my GV number (placing a call from my car, the person on the other end sees my native number, even though I have everything set up properly)

And living in an area with spotty service... native SMS always send, and the GV "over data" SMS usually fail. Unless they can fix a LOT of issues AND add incentive to come back, I think I'm fine without it for now.

Out of curiosity, why didn't you keep using it, but with Hangouts instead?

Group SMS and MMS messages weren't supported by the backing service. As group messages became more popular as more of my friends got smartphones, I'd miss more and more communications that my friends were having. Additionally, there were times when even regular SMS messages would be delivered minutes or hours late. The whole system felt unreliable. It felt like the only purpose was to send outbound messages from the computer.

At the time that I switched, the Hangouts app was having some difficulties of its own. The biggest issue I had with it is that Hangouts would try to upgrade me from an SMS chat to a Hangouts chat with someone, when the recipient was an infrequent or Gmail-only Hangouts user. Google would recognize their number and send Hangouts messages, they wouldn't see the messages on their iOS device because they didn't have a Hangouts app, so to them it would seem like I had stopped responding.

Same gripe I've had on iOS past, could never figure out if my response was going to go over sms, imessage, or email, and if email which account, so I just avoid as much as possible, and don't setup additional accounts on my iOS devices or ones i set up. Mostly to avoid getting "why am i getting email responses to my text messages" questions etc.

Not saying it's hard or complicated, just hard and complicated enough for me to avoid. When I send someone a message there should be no guesswork involved. Not sure how both google and apple could mess this stuff up so badly in their attempts to make it "just work." Or how much of the issue is the "use only our ecosystem or your shit may to break" mentality.

:grumble grumble:

Apple doesn't care if you can communicate with non Apple users. They have their iMessage population hostage. Those people can never switch to Android because they'll be left out of group texts. It's vendor lock-in of the highest order. Spectacular play by Apple, really. They guarantee switching to Android is painful, you risk losing business deals and messages from friends. I doubt it's legal, but for now they are getting away with it.

I've never had a problem with mixed Android/iOS group messages and media with iMessage. I've made no special effort to get it to work. It's seamless. Am I doing something wrong? Or right, rather?

Now, back when I used Android I remember Hangouts ruining everything it touched and I had to switch back to the deprecated Messages app (which was completely fine and did not need replacing) to fix it. Maybe the problem with the Android users on these group texts isn't on the iMessage side....

If you associate your phone number with an iMessage account, and then deactivate iMessage, Apple will just silently stop delivering group iMessages to you. You won't notice and your friends won't notice, they'll just stop coming.

If you unregister your number from iMessages, group texts switch over from iMessages to non-iMessage as soon as you send a message that has a member in it that is no longer iMessage.

That's not true. Everyone in the thread has to delete the thread and create a new one before new messages will go to an iMessage-deactivated number.

This has not been my experience. I have some very long running group messages that switched over automatically when my brother switched from iPhone to Android.

Why would Android users be left out of group texts? I regularly message a group that has a mix of iMessage/SMS users and it's worked pretty well.

When you switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, other people's iPhones will continue to send you messages over iMessage, which your Android phone will never see.

If you include a non-iOS number in a group chat it becomes an SMS group chat. Not sure what the big deal is.

That's true, but if one of the people in an existing thread deactivates iMessage it will stay as an iMessage group chat and silently fail to deliver to that person.

Even now with Fi, I experience delays in delivery of SMS occasionally. I don't do SMS normally and most of the time I receive SMS for verification codes. A delay is annoying for that purpose.

I just recently realized I had to tell Hangouts to ring.

I also haven't figured out how to set it to have Hangouts ring when I am on wifi and forward to the phone only when I'm not. So I get dueling ringers.

I thought Hangouts only got those features working with Google Voice numbers about a year ago?

Has it really only been that long ago? I honestly thought it was longer than that.

It's hard to say since they added features over time. Hangouts launched in May 2013, then got one side of the MMS features working via Google Voice numbers in September 2014 http://www.droid-life.com/2014/09/10/mms-now-a-part-of-googl... Depending on your carrier, it might send the SMS recipient a URL to the content instead of a real MMS. And even now, there's no way to search messages from within the Hangouts app. You have to search from your gmail!

There was some other limitation for a while that kept me from moving. Group messages, or voicemail maybe? They did eventually fix it though, so I can't remember.

As far as I know, you can't call landlines with WhatsApp, iMessage, or FB Messenger. There's value in having a second number that is treated like a cell phone. I can register for accounts with it (Signal, Twitter, etc), and my real phone number stays private. During college, I gave out my GV number for privacy, but it didn't support MMS at the time. Couldn't get photos, and then they wanted me to use Hangouts & claimed voice would be phased out. It was a real bummer, and the Hangouts experience was strange, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

I'm glad this is being updated, because it provides value to me and definitely other people, too. If WhatsApp can connect you to landlines or function as an actual phone, then that's excellent news. Even so, I would still appreciate having more options.

I just use it as a secondary number because the area code for my real number is for so far away. Sometimes that would seem strange or suspicious, and I use it during those times.

Close to how I feel about most Google products or APIs.

"Hey, that's cool! But remember when they randomly killed X, Y, Z," etc...

At least Voice has lasted, I guess.