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Apple hangs up on Google’s phone service
Tom Simonite, online technology editor
The tech blogosphere is preoccupied today with reports that Apple has blocked an iPhone software app released by Google for users of its Google Voice telephony service.
The service not only lets users redirect phone numbers to different devices and lines as required, and on a per-caller basis, but also provides free text messages and cut-rate international calling. The move has led some to suggest that Apple’s chosen US cellphone network AT&T applied the pressure to block the app over fears of lost revenue.
That hasn’t been confirmed as yet, but as I pointed out just a few weeks ago, products like Google Voice pose a real threat to the established ways of doing business by charging for connecting one cellphone to another, or to the internet.
Now that everything your phone sends and receives is simply digital
bandwidth, we’re going to see more and more services appear that
undermine the traditional distinction between mobile voice, text
message and web data.The tech blogosphere is preoccupied today with reports that Apple has blocked an iPhone software app released by Google for users of its Google Voice telephony service.
The service not only lets users redirect phone numbers to different devices and lines as required, and on a per-caller basis, but also provides free text messages and cut-rate international calling. The move has led some to suggest that Apple’s chosen US cellphone network AT&T applied the pressure to block the app over fears of lost revenue.
That hasn’t been confirmed as yet, but as I pointed out just a few weeks ago, products like Google Voice pose a real threat to the established ways of doing business by charging for connecting one cellphone to another, or to the internet.
Software and web-based services offer the potential to do novel, fun and even useful things with cellphones now, if the existing networks would only relax a little. Google Voice provides a good example: the search and advertising giant can now simply create a web version of its application for users to access on their phones.
Rather than cellphone networks attempting to control how people use their data, switching to a more transparent system where customers simply pay for the bandwidth they use, whether for web, voice or any other service, may be the only logical endpoint.
