Oh man you missed the giant shitshow in the past few weeks. Google finally rolled out data calling support on their Android and iOS clients.

Google being Google completely fucked up the UX on inbound call routing. Lets say you enabled data calling to try it out because why not, they actually put something in the changelog other than 'bugs and fixes'. This will immediately break inbound calling and de-select routing calls to your phone numbers over carrier. Then if you reverted the setting to carrier, it just make it so calls went nowhere.

I've had a Google Voice number as my primary for over a decade, it took me a few days to notice none of my calls were ringing inbound. It took me over a day to figure out how to re-enable it, because you couldn't just have the line paired, you had to enable inbound calling in the app to both the phone and the app.

Google still maintains two different panels for Google Voice. This has been the case for a couple years now. Both have different features, anything important like porting and setting up voicemail manually will have to happen through 'legacy Google Voice'. It's insane.

I only recently noticed that Voice was dropping certain text messages from being forwarded so I had missed whole conversations with friends. It made me feel inconsiderate. In the meantime, I'm checking the Voice app often, but I've now started to push everyone away from my gVoice number to my actual number.

GV supports group chats/MMS now, however, you can't mute or leave a group chat, at least not with the iOS client. (Given my family's penchant for starting a group MMS for the most minor of occurrences, I'm not sure the group chat support is a blessing or a curse.)

I think that from a pure technical standpoint, you can't leave a MMS group any more than you can leave a reply-all email chain. "Leaving" a group usually just involves your phone dropping any texts it gets directed to that group.

(Obviously iMessage is different because it's not actually MMS)

The only Google service I rely on is Gmail, because it's the only Google service I can have a reasonable expectation of still being around in five years.

With the way they keep adding proprietary extensions to it, I wouldn't be so sure if it'll actually support sending email to non-gmail clients in five years.

Google Voice is actually a safer bet as there's no doubt all sorts of legal snares they'd hit if they shut it down. Bandwidth.com runs things behind the scenes and is a competent company to do business with. They'd likely have to spin it off if they wanted to discontinue it.

The Gmail web client has also become a bloated mess that takes four to five times as long to display the inbox after its recent "upgrade".

I hand out my actual mobile# to friends/family.

I give out my GV# (I use call-screening) to everyone (esp. businesses) and put it on my gmail .sig.

I get almost no spam calls at all.

I'd like to know how you don't receive spam calls to your mobile # as the robo-dialers just go through the entire list of phone numbers in that area code, so you have to receive some to that device. I do the same as you but with Skype instead of GV, but my mobile # gets hosed by robo-dialers.

Because while it's a common assumption that the spam callers do this, they don't actually do this, because while robocalling is sometimes illegal, actually dialing every single number removes any/all plausible deniability if they're ever caught, and provides little/no additional benefit.

> Because while it's a common assumption that the spam callers do this, they don't actually do this

It sure looks like they do. Spammers have been calling our office lines daily (including numbers that aren't assigned to anyone and aren't given out). The spam calls come in numerical sequence. They're clearly just working through every possible phone number, in sequence.

They do that for your office (343-564-21xx), but not globally (000-000-0000, 000-000-0001, etc). There's a substantial difference.

I also have carrier-based (free) spam prevention which may prevent the POTS equivalent of a port-scan. But that wasn't enough - with GV based call screening, it's now down to near-zero.