Newsletter
Google Voice’s long and arduous path has finally culminated with the integration of Voice into Hangouts last month, officially landing on Android some months after Google had implemented the feature onto the iOS platform. There were still a few things missing from the newly integrated Google Voice, but for the most part the two services play very nice together and in my own personal experience they work pretty well, voice calls included. One notable thing that had been missing though from Google Voice for North America was the support for MMS through Google Voice.
Even before the integration with Hangouts, MMS were never supported within Google Voice, which made using your Google Voice number to send picture messages or receive them impossible, leaving you to have to switch to another messaging service to get or send those pictures through. This wasn’t a huge issue for people who had carrier numbers, as they could easily just use their regular number for this task, however it was just the act of having to use two separate clients to get the job done that was more annoying than anything. Today all of that ends as Google has made MMS support live within Google Voice across many North American carriers, including the major ones like T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint, as well as many others.
Google admits to working with nearly 100 NA carriers to get this service up and running for quite some time and as Google’s Alex Wiesen puts it in his G+ post announcing this now live capability, we can “say goodbye to FOMO(fear of missing out),” as we all should be able to now use Google Voice going forward for all incoming and outgoing MMS messages. It’s also worth noting that support for the MMS within Voice extends to big Canadian carriers too like TELUS, Rogers, and Bell Canada. This makes things all the more easy to narrow down your messaging and voice call services to one simple app, especially for those who have plenty of WiFi access available to them on top of a huge monthly data package. Are you excited to finally see this capability live within the app?