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Apple Kills Google Voice Apps On the iPhone
molnarcs writes "Apple pulls Google Voice-enabled applications from its App Store, citing duplication of functionality. The move affects both Google's official Google Voice and third party apps like Voice Central. Sean Kovacs, main developer of GV Mobile, says that he had personal approval for his app from Phil Shiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, last April. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid suspects AT&T behind the move."
Don't worry, you can still use it with Cydia!!!
Also on appulo.us
music lover since 1969
According to Jon Gruber, who has reliable sources inside Apple, AT&T pulled their weight to make this happen.
Google Voice for phone calls uses at&t minutes, which don't cost Apple.
Yes but using Google voice to make international calls would be way cheaper than making a phone call on your cell phone with AT&T. At the moment, the iPhone isn't just the device, it's also the infrastructure that supports the iPhone (which you pay gobs for). Google voice offers services that compete with AT&T and the iPhone infrastructure in ways big enough to hurt the bottom line of AT&T, which as you can see from other comments at the least, made this app go pouf disappear.
jailbroken iPhone with no official warranty or support
Who are you, the writer for "Reefer Madness"?
If you need warranty work done, you simply un-jailbreak it (or restore it from scratch). And not even that is necessary for an obvious hardware flaw.
It doesn't void your warranty.
Unlocking is a different matter - but that also has zero to do with Cydia and alternate App Stores.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ah, but you can use Google Voice to do text messaging, and if you configure it right, those messages never go through AT&T's SMS system, so they can't charge you for them.
SMS is gold, especially when they can charge you--what is it?--$10/mo for 500 texts. They don't want to lose that by having your SMS data going over the flat-rate data plan. You know, because SMS data are not bits like the 3G network bits, no way they could ever change that. Except, of course, Google has.
I love all the Apple bashing; I'm sure Apple could care less, but AT&T sees a threat, and for the time being, they're the exclusive provider and they set at least some of the rules.
Just the other day, the CEO of AT&T indicated that he knew which way the wind was blowing, and that he didn't expect the lucrative exclusive deal to last forever; you'd think that they'd try a little harder to make iPhone users *want* to stay with AT&T...
The CB App. What's your 20?
30?
It is very unlikely that a jailbroken iPhone will brick during an update, at least as long as Apple keeps doing updates the way they have in the past. Updates are distributed as disk images, which overwrite the partition on the iPhone that does not hold music. It's hard to make the system inoperable when you replace the whole system at once.
In addition, if you do brick the iPhone, it has a really handy feature where holding down both buttons in a really precise but not particularly hard sequence will put it into a mode where the whole disk can be accessed by iTunes. Even the most dead iPhone can be restored this way. If this doesn't work, then chances are something happened to your iPhone at the hardware level, not the software level.
Where you'll really get in to trouble with bricked iPhones is unlocking, which is different from jailbreaking. An unlocked iPhone can be used with SIM cards from other carriers, so you could use your iPhone with Verizon, etc. To unlock the iPhone, you need to overwrite the firmware in the cellular modem, and if there's an update to that firmware in the future, or an update to the OS that expects different firmware, this can brick your iPhone pretty irretrievably.