Google has extended their trial of Gmail Voice through the remainder of 2011.

Launched back in August 2010, gmail voice is an extension to gmail which allows users to call standard telephone numbers in Canada and the USA directly from gmail for free. Calls to other countries can be made for low rates. It achieved remarkable early success, as 1 million phone calls were made in the first 24 hours alone. 10 million calls were placed using the service in its first week.

Intended to be a market test, Google stated that they wanted to keep the service free for Canada/US calls, but needed to be able to justify it through some kind of revenue-generating business case. Apparently they found enough of one to warrant extending the service through 2011.

If the user has a Google Voice account, that person can also receive phone calls through their web browser. If the user does not have a Google Voice account (non-US users), the user will not be able to receive incoming phone calls to their browser.

I personally tried it on my laptop to make a call over wireless-g wifi and my home 15/1 cable connection and had issues with the sound cutting out and the connection dropping. Skype worked just fine immediately after however. I admittedly haven’t given it too much of a trial however, but am hopeful that it will become more usable.

Oh, and unfortunately it doesn’t work on mobile phones, at least not on my iPhone4.

1. Create a US iTunes account (no credit card needed). See here.
2. Using your iDevice, go to Settings/Store/Sign Out
3. Sign in to your US iTunes account
4. Download the Google Voice app on the App Store
5. Repeat sign out/sign in process, but sign in to your regular iTunes account.

Voila.

The techcrunch story has a lot of the details on the history of the app, but, briefly, it has been a long time in coming. Apple approved, then removed a third-party app called GV Mobile, which was essentially a Google Voice front-end, saying that the app violated Apple’s terms of use for apps in that it replicated functionality of the built-in phone application.

Recently, Apple revised its app guidlines, and GV Mobile (now GV Mobile+), as well as some others have been re-admitted. The official Google Voice app has been in the review queue for a while and just today has been approved.

But only in the US.

This makes sense, seeing as how Google Voice is officially only available in the US, and it is fairly easy to get around the geoblocking on this app as well. You’ll just need a US iTunes account (see here), and then follow my instructions here. I just tested it out and have the app on my Canadian iPhone.

The app does not work with “gmail voice” as you do need a full Google Voice account in order to log in to the app.

The app doesn’t seem to work with the iPod Touch (even the 4th gen which has a speaker and mic, and the ability to use the mic-enabled headphones), so this seems like an oversight. Let’s see if Google fixes this and allows iPod Touch users to use the app as well. No word yet on if it works with the iPad.

At least the app is here now (for some of us). Now we just need Google to expand Google Voice service to other countries.

Push notifications for text messaging are very quick and work as expected. It’s a nice way to get around expensive text messaging fees if you don’t subscribe to a plan.

They claim that there is no official word yet, just rumours that the app has been approved by Apple. This makes sense however, as several other Google Voice apps have been approved recently, with Apple’s revamping of the rules on the App Store.

I wonder how the producers of the other Google Voice apps will fare, as the official Google version is likely to be free…

Sean Kovacs has tweeted that GV Mobile+ has been approved (or at least that’s what I gather from it). That’s two today!

Update: (taken from seankovacs’ blog)

After a long year and a half of being home sick, GV Mobile (+) makes an epic return to the App Store. The app is still propagating to all the servers, so it may take a bit before it shows up. Here is the direct link: GV Mobile +. I’ll be blowing away some promo codes via Twitter (@seankovacs) once I get them AND if #gvmobile trends on Twitter, I’ll set that bad boy to free for the night.

The first Google Voice app has hit the app store, and it’s called GV Connect. Providing a front end to the Google Voice service, GV Connect allows users of devices running Apple iOS platform to have a native app with which to interact with Google Voice.

As you may know, one famous Google Voice app, GV Mobile, was approved, de-approved, and removed from the App Store several months ago as part of Apple’s cryptic and inconsistent app approval process. A recent re-think of this policy has seen Apple come around on this issue, and the developer of GV Mobile, Sean Kovacs, has said that Apple is now interested in re-examining his app (to be called GV Mobile+).

However, another app has hit the App Store first, and it is GV Connect. We’ll see how quickly they come now, and it will be interesting to see if Google comes out with their own native Google Voice app (one had apparently been developed and submitted to Apple months ago).

Be sure to check out the GV Mobile+ screenshots to compare the two apps.

Just to recap for those not up to date, Sean Kovacs is a part-time app developer who wrote an app called GV Mobile for the iPhone. It was approved by Apple, bought by users of the service, and then was mysteriously removed from the App Store for “replicating iPhone functionality”. Sean then deleted GV Mobile from the App Store, and sold it on the jailbroken app store, Cydia.

Apple recently revised the App Store guidelines, and it appears as though GV Mobile will be allowed back in. Because Sean deleted the app from the Apple database, he has to submit it as a new app, hence the slight name change to GV Mobile+.

Sean just posted some pictures of the app in action:

Very briefly, Apple’s app approval guidelines were not transparent, were quite arbitrary, and seemed to not be applied consistently. This made many developers frustrated when their apps were rejected from the app store. One of the most relevant apps that I have been following is GV Mobile by Sean Kovacs.

GV Mobile was an app for the iPhone which was a nice front-end to Google Voice. It was approved by Apple, went on sale for a short time (I bought it), and allowed a user to dial phone numbers, listen to voicemails, and access all of Google Voice’s functionality. Unfortunately, at some point it was disapproved of by Apple and was removed from the App store, on the basis that it replicated functionality of the iPhone (namely the dialer).

This was odd as there were many other apps on the App store which had dialers and “replicated functionality” yet were allowed to remain. Speculation was that it was more of an attack on Google Voice than on apps with dialers.

The fallout of this was when users restored their devices, or bought a new one, they could not get access to another copy of GV Mobile, despite having paid for it. This was not the developer’s fault (he subsequently released the app on Cydia, the app store for jailbroken iPhones), and left many users with nothing to show for their money.

Another consequence of this was push notifications never came to GV Mobile, even for those users who never deleted the app. No official app status means no use of Apple’s push notification servers. This means you could get a voicemail or text but not know about it until you manually checked the app.

All of this is now water under the bridge as Sean has gotten confirmation that GV Mobile can be resubmitted to the App store and will likely see it get approved.

Good news: I did get confirmation back from Apple that it will most likely get back in once I resubmit.

1. Call Screening – Caller is sent to voicemail and you can listen in.
2. Switching Calls – Receive a call in gmail, transfer it to your cell
3. Call Recording – Self-explanatory
4. Click-to-Dial Chrome Extension – A new extension for Chrome allows you to click on any phone number in a webpage and use gmail to call it.