Apple made headlines earlier this week in the tech community when they pulled multiple applications using Google's new Voice service from their App Store without any warning or notification, leaving developers and Google Voice users with an ill-fit explanation for this act, and a pathetic support system for the community responsible for these applications. This whole story goes as a red flag to the developer community, this fiasco serves as a warning that although your time spent building a truly useful communicative tool for the iPhone audience is entirely at the audience of Apple's App Store. Be aware that although it may giveth, it may taketh away, without any practical reason or assistance to fix whatever may be the problem with your product.

But before we take a deeper look into what has happened with the applications, let's take a step back and understand what Google Voice is. Google Voice was relaunched (previously known as “Grand Central”) earlier this year in March, and it works as your very own virtual phone receptionist and VoIP phone line. In many ways it's features remind me of what virtual PBX (private branch exchange) phone systems utilize, but it instead provides those features to you and not a small business or large corporation. Imagine having one phone number, except that instead of it being tethered to just one of your phones it can reach any and all of your phones. Furthermore, Google Voice comes with various features that take advantage of this accessibility, such as allowing you to organize your calls from the source to whichever phone or groups of phones you'd like them to reach, or creating personalized voicemail greetings for certain callers. Google is offering this service free with minimal charges for long distance calls or phone number changes, but it's only offered to prospective users by invitation, which you could ask for by going to the Google Voice page and adding your name onto the list.
The service is accessible online through your web browser, including supported web browsers on your mobile phone, where users can literally read transcribed voicemail messages, download and share or send recorded messages, or make calls to people straight from the computer. From the web browser you could also change settings for your account that allow you to block incoming calls that have their caller ID blocked, too. But the features just keep coming: you could also host conference calls right on your phone, record entire phone calls and download them later to your computer, and listen in on callers leaving you a voicemail in case you'd actually like to talk to the person instead of playing phone-tag back and forth after they've left a message and disconnected. There are still other features I haven't mentioned, but you could read about them and see them in action here.
In short, this is a truly useful and powerful service offered free from Google. This is not your ordinary “iFart v3.0” or some other virtual toy, this is an application that helps a phone user's efficiency and helps them organize their voicemail or SMS messages and allows them to set their accessibility for when and where they would like to be reached by whomever may be calling. This is a product that improves upon the life of somebody that finds themselves always tied to their phones.

So, why would Apple not allow Google Voice to exist on the iPhone? That is the mystery behind their latest actions concerning third-party applications that utilized the Google Voice service. First, Google had offered Apple an official application straight from Google itself allowing iPhone users to access their Google Voice account directly, but Apple had turned down the official application six weeks after it had been submitted through their review system. In addition to that, two independent applications that utilized the Google Voice service were removed from Apple's App Store as well. Both independent developers have been pretty outspoken about the event: a VoiceCentral developer from Riverturn posted on their blog their experience with Apple during and following the removal of their app from the App Store. VoiceCentral had been removed from the store without any notification or warning to the developer, with only the explanation of it duplicating features of the iPhone and sparking confusion within the community and that this is against company policy. But, if that is true, than why are there other apps that utilize the features that Google Voice offers still freely existing in the App Store?
The App Store representative would not go into any specific detail as to what features are causing confusion, nor would they assist them in identifying what could changed to fit Apple's policy. But that's not all, Apple has been forwarding any requests for refunds to VoiceCentral, which posted a response to their blog: “The users that you abandoned certainly deserve refunds if they want them. But they deserve those refunds from you not us. You let them down. You made it impossible for them to receive fixes and/or improvements. We were fulfilling our end of the bargain. Why should those refunds come out of our pocket?”

We still haven't found a reason why Apple would kick Google Voice off the iPhone, and from what I've seen, it seems like Apple really did want the service! Sean Kovacs, developer of the other independent Google Voice app says that Phil Schiller even approved his application personally. For a business that uses the slogan, “There's an app for that,”, it doesn't make sense for Apple to remove these apps. This is leading many developers and the user community speculating that AT&T is the motivated force behind the removal. AT&T may be aware that Google Voice's VoIP service through 3G (unlike Skype's service through WiFi) would undercut profits by allowing users to place calls from outside of their phone plans, circumventing their regular charges for potentially more affordable data plan fees. Although possible, this is only speculation and we may be proven wrong. But Apple has not done anything to clarify this further to the developers, nor to the user community. That may change soon, however, since on Friday the Federal Communications Committee sent letters to Apple and AT&T inquiring as to why the Google Voice applications had been made unavailable to users. Their concern over the matter is in regards to facilitating a market that is competitive, innovative and beneficial to consumers.