When Google Voice confirmed up means again in 2009, I used to be one of many first to enroll. Ditto for Google Fi. However final month I ditched each of them on the identical time, turning my again on an astonishing fifteen years of built-in providers. Why? As a result of Google turned its again on me, and I used to be uninterested in coping with its hypocrisy.
Slightly context, should you’re not conscious. Google Voice is the corporate’s number-forwarding service, and it was extraordinarily cool when it first debuted. You bought your individual new telephone quantity, which Google operated as a free VOIP service, and you may use it with any present phone or quantity. It could mainly exchange your customary cell or landline quantity, in addition to allow you to entry textual content messages through a devoted app in your telephone or the online. For somebody who opinions telephones, and doesn’t wish to always swap SIM playing cards, it’s superior.
Google Fi is Google’s cellular digital community operator, a branded service service that competes (in smaller methods) with corporations like AT&T and Verizon. It enables you to purchase your cell service from the identical place you purchase Pixel telephones, kind of, and gives fairly good offers should you’re okay with leaning on T-Cellular’s smaller community as a spine. It’s particularly good should you occur to be a Pixel Watch proprietor (and I’m). I’ll add that each Google Voice and Google Fi are solely out there to customers in the USA, although the latter has good worldwide roaming choices.
I preferred each Voice and Fi for a very long time, particularly as somebody who reviewed telephones professionally. Voice particularly let me textual content and name from a laptop computer or desktop PC lengthy earlier than extra widespread choices grew to become out there. Fi, like T-Cellular, was usually nice and extra inexpensive as long as I used to be inside the metropolis limits. So why did I make a pointy, clear break with Google’s administration of my cellular connections?
It wasn’t due to Google’s privateness points, although it actually has these in abundance. It’s not as a result of I believe my new cell supplier, Verizon, is someway higher or much less evil. It isn’t. Nope, I used to be sick of Google ignoring its Voice service, particularly within the gentle of a extremely public marketing campaign towards Apple. Between that and a few dramatic interoperability points, I hit the highway for much less aggravating pastures.
Google pesters Apple to help RCS
Bear in mind when Google was pestering Apple so as to add RCS capabilities to the iPhone? I positive do. Google publically nagged Apple to undertake the trendy texting customary, and at last convey extra fluid communication between iMessage and different platforms (primarily SMS on Android), for over a calendar yr. It even made a bit celebratory commercial when the iPhone started to play good, enabling higher help for issues like emoji reactions, group textual content options, and high-quality picture and video sharing.
So given Google’s extraordinarily public help of cross-platform RCS, why the ever-loving heck doesn’t Google Voice help RCS?
Yup, despite the fact that Google Voice has been round for fifteen years, lengthy predating Google’s united Messages texting app for Android, Voice nonetheless doesn’t help RCS messaging. If you happen to use Voice on Android (or anyplace else, together with the iPhone!), you’re caught with horrible pictures and the “Ted like this message” response that Google complained about as little as three months in the past. Not solely does this occur between Voice customers and iPhone customers, it even occurs should you’re utilizing Voice and chatting with different Android customers.
Google Voice, as an SMS platform, is a freakin’ dinosaur.
I certainly don’t have to clarify why Google missing RCS help on one in every of its personal telephone merchandise is a foul look. And I’m not the one one to make this criticism. Each common customers and my tech journalist fellows have identified this inconsistency for years. Whereas Google Voice is limping together with minimal updates, apparently avoiding the notorious Google Graveyard due to some good company integrations, it undoubtedly looks like its customers have been deserted.
Google tried — and failed — to make a messaging walled backyard
However even that isn’t what actually rankles me. It’s Google’s holier-than-thou perspective. Google has pushed Apple to undertake RCS, implying that it’s doing so on behalf of the roughly half of the market that’s utilizing Android. And whereas Android customers actually need to have the ability to chat with iPhone customers extra fluidly, that’s not the driving issue behind Google’s marketing campaign.
The reality is that iMessage is an actual draw to the iPhone, particularly for youthful customers who’ve made the “Android inexperienced textual content” a scarlet letter. And that’s a refined risk to Android. I believe that Google fears iMessage as a product excess of it altruistically desires to enhance messaging throughout the board.
Petter Ahrnstedt
Need extra proof? Google would completely kill to be in Apple’s place with iMessage. As a result of it has tried to get there, a number of occasions, with a number of chat providers. Google Discuss. Google Voice. Google Wave, with its personal built-in chat service a la Fb. Google Buzz. Google+, once more with a chat part. Google Hangouts. Google Allo. Google Chat (which is what individuals known as Discuss for the longest time). And that was the checklist as of three years in the past, not together with “Messages” as an app-slash-platform on Android, Chrome, and the online.
Google has tried to create a communications backyard, with various levels of partitions, throughout three many years. And it has failed. So it’s arduous to see the push towards Apple’s iMessage as something greater than bitter grapes. Don’t get me unsuitable, Google goading Apple into not less than some interoperability with RCS is certainly a win for customers and customers. However Google solely did it after it spent years and years exhausting each doable possibility to increase its monopolistic practices into this sphere.
Google Voice and Google Fi couldn’t work collectively
So yeah, seeing Google faux to be the individuals’s champion for open messaging after years of Voice customers begging for RCS was galling. As my sister welcomed her first youngster and I all of a sudden began to care about getting higher-quality pictures and movies, I began searching for a means out. (For the file, my sister is additionally an Android and Pixel person of over a decade — see why that is so irritating for us, Google?)
So a few years in the past, whereas nonetheless utilizing Google Voice and Google Fi, I attempted to port my Voice quantity to Fi. In idea, despite the fact that Google Voice is a VOIP service, it ought to have been similar to porting a quantity from any service to a different. Google Fi was app-agnostic, and will have supported RCS. I’d have to change apps from Voice to Messages, however it might lastly work.
It didn’t. The porting course of, that’s. There’s a reasonably primary device on-line to port your quantity into Google Fi, however for no matter cause, it didn’t settle for my Voice quantity. “Not eligible for switch.” I wasn’t completely shocked by this, because the VOIP nature of the Google Voice quantity generally causes complications — some banks and providers like Uber don’t prefer it, and for that cause I’ve had to make use of my backup (the quantity hooked up to my bodily SIM card) every now and then. Others have skilled the identical problem making an attempt to maneuver a quantity from Voice to Fi.
Michael Crider/Foundry
So I put in a help ticket with Google Fi, the incarnation of Google that I had been paying $60 a month to for years, and waited. And waited. And waited. For a yr. And nothing occurred. And nothing occurred for one other yr.
Quick ahead to December, 2024. I’m staring down the barrel of a two-week vacation journey to rural Texas, by which many pictures and movies might be shared. I attempt to port my Google Voice quantity over to Google Fi once more. It received’t work. The automated system doesn’t say how or why quantity porting is damaged, simply that it isn’t out there for that quantity, an expertise that’s apparently frequent sufficient that it has a warning on the help web page: “Remember that some Google Voice numbers can’t be transferred to Google Fi.”
Why? How? Is there any hope for these affected? No concept. I grit my enamel and put together to truly contact a human working for Google.
I begin with Google Fi, since once more, they’re those I’m paying. I ask if there’s any cause that Google Voice numbers shouldn’t be capable of be ported. They are saying no. I strive once more, and present the proof that it doesn’t work. They allegedly get somebody from Google Voice within the dialog (allegedly, as a result of that is all taking place in a text-based interface, and it might be the identical particular person for all I do know). The Google Voice particular person tries to port. It doesn’t work.
The telephone quantity that I’ve been utilizing for fifteen years is, by all appearances, trapped on Voice, a zombie platform that doesn’t help the RCS options Google itself has been championing in public. Out of frustration (and sure, I admit, no small quantity of Karen-style entitlement), I ask the Voice customer support particular person when Google Voice will add RCS help, even linking them to the movies of that exact same public Google marketing campaign.
The service particular person apologizes, however they don’t have any info on any plans so as to add RCS help to Google Voice. So in abstract, a Google texting service refuses to implement the texting requirements that Google calls for Apple implement, and in addition can not full a really primary telephone service factor into one other Google service.
Google doesn’t deserve your loyalty
At this level I let my fingers do the strolling over to Verizon Wi-fi’s web site, which has a device that permits you to take a look at whether or not or not you possibly can import your quantity to the service. You don’t have to join an account. In accordance with this web site, it may settle for my Google Voice quantity, VOIP warts and all, and get me arrange with an eSIM in just some minutes.
Pictured: not me, not my telephone, not my pc. However the precise emotion I felt making an attempt to make use of a Google product with one other Google product.
Anna Tarazevich/Pexels
So I did it. I’m on Verizon now, and never particularly comfortable about it — someway Verizon managed to get me signed up for the service instantly with out really having a Verizon account, and I needed to drive to a retail retailer to pay my first invoice.
However I saved the telephone quantity I’ve been utilizing for 15 years, now unshackled from any Google service, and I’m getting high-res pictures and movies from my sister and brother-in-law. And not less than Verizon by no means pretended to be a champion of open requirements. Why might Verizon port the quantity in with none issues, when Google couldn’t do it from one in every of its personal providers to a different? I don’t know. I actually begged Google to inform me throughout a number of years, and it couldn’t.
I totally admit that this text is a little bit of therapeutic whining on my half. However I do know there are different Voice and Fi customers who’ve the identical complaints. To you I say: Strive getting off of Google. No firm deserves your loyalty, and thru hypocrisy and apathy, Google deserves it even much less.