Google Voice for iPhone Is Now (Finally) Available

Google Voice for iPhone Is Now (Finally) Available

Well, here's a pleasant late-night surprise. Looks like Google Hangouts finally has the long-overdue integration with Google Voice, meaning that your messages from Google Voice (and not traditional SMS messages from the actual phone number assigned to your SIM card — it's a bit of a mess to explain, we know) can finally show up in Google Hangouts.

That means a couple things. First is that you'll only need one app — Hangouts — to receive text messages and Hangouts messages. (Not sure yet what that means for voicemails through Google Voice.) It also means that you'll be able to get traditional text messages through the Hangouts extension in Chrome, which is nice.

On the traditional web side, you'll get a couple notifications at google.com/voice, letting you know that you've decided to go down this long and winding road. (And associated help page, located here, isn't yet live, suggesting this is all still rolling out now.)

And we're not quite sure what any of this means for MMS messages. A quick test of receiving those failed (seriously, Andrew, no more sexting), so stay tuned for more on that, hopefully. We were able to send a rather inappropriate picture back to Andrew over Hangouts, however. So there's that.

And we're also not sure what this means for setting up Google Voice in the first place — that's always needed the separate Google Voice app. We'll see if that changes.

Looks like this is all being turned on server side, as there's no new app to download. Figure Google will give us all a heads up when things are officially official. Hopefully once the sun comes up. But for now, have fun. Try not to break anything.