Google couldn’t get its official Google Voice iPhone app through Apple’s App Store approval process, so now they’ve released an updated, and much-improved, webapp version. The official Google Voice blog announced the update and details some of its features.
This new version is reached simply by going to the Google Voice website in iPhone’s Mobile Safari. The webapp lets you take advantage of all of Google Voice’s features, like making outgoing calls, sending text messages, and listening to voice mails. The app uses the new HTML5 specification to pull off some its neat tricks. You can bookmark the site so that an icon shows your iPhone’s home screen and seems like a “real” app.
Google also added a feature that will show use your Google Voice number as the outgoing call ID so that return calls come back to your Google Voice number. The web app will also work on Palm’s new phones.
In July, Google submitted an official Google Voice application to Apple, but the app didn’t pass the approval process. This became a major falling out between Apple/AT&T and Google, to the point where the FCC was brought it to investigate the cause for the application’s denial.
