Apple: “It’s a good job AT&T didn’t like it.”
So it was confirmed that AT&T were the ones to blame for the Google Voice rejection on the App Store. I’m not surprised by this fact at all to be brutally honest. AT&T don’t want to lose money do they? If Apple were to accept an app on the iPhone which allowed free SMS and cheaper long-distance calls than the actual carrier of the device it ran on, it’s easy to see why AT&T wouldn’t be happy.
But I think it’s too easy to blame AT&T for the entirety of the whole mess. It’s not AT&T who are the ones physically pulling already approved applications off the store, that have been sitting there happily for almost five months. I find it extremely odd that nearing the time Google is officially releasing a Google Voice client, all of a sudden AT&T have decided that it doesn’t like Google Voice being on the iPhone - officially or not. Sure AT&T may not like the thought of it’s existence, but it hadn’t made any action to stop ‘GV Mobile’ or ‘Voice Central’ as soon as they were trying to be approved to the App Store as they apparently have when Google submitted their own client.
At the end of the day, Apple are ultimately the ones controlling what goes on the iPhone and what does not. When you take a few steps back and look at the overall picture of the smart-phone world, Google are one main competitor with Apple when you include both it’s Google Voice services and the Android platform. If the client Google wanted to release on the iPhone really did take off, there could be some severe consequences left for Apple to deal with.
Google Voice would potentially mess up the iPhone’s business model, not just the carrier’s (AT&T, O2 etc.) whose contracts subsidise the price of the device so people can afford to actually buy it. In the U.K, if you want the iPhone on O2’s Pay & Go service (meaning no monthly contract) the 32GB iPhone 3GS will cost you a whopping £538.30. That is a cringe-worthy price to pay for a phone (which could lead me on to another topic completely on how Apple rips Britain off). With the cheapest Pay Monthly service on O2 (priced at £29.38) the same phone costs £274.23. Yes, it’s still expensive and yes, you are paying a total of £803.07 for the phone and the 18 month contract. From this little investigation you can see that anyone in the U.K who has this phone is well and truly mad, but at least this way O2 has subsidised the price of the iPhone to nearly half of what it apparently ‘should’ cost. If Google Voice meant that O2 and AT&T started to lose money they wouldn’t be able to subsidise the iPhone like they do. Ergo - No one would be able to afford an iPhone.
To me, while it seems very easy and convenient to blame AT&T for the whole charade, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple were in full support of this decision and ‘in the interest of fairness’ took down the unofficial Google Voice clients to make sure nothing could be done to make Google’s service competitive. Maybe it was AT&T who pointed Apple’s attention to it, or maybe it was the other way round. What I believe is that both parties signed the treaty to get Google Voice off of the iPhone.
