Amidst this past summer’s brawl over whether Apple would accept the Google Voice app, Google promised that it would bring Google Voice to the iphone “one way or the other,” in the words of Vic Gundotra, the vice president of engineering for mobile apps at Google. Today, Google delivered their promise with Google Voice’s release as a web application, accessible to owners of the iphone and Palm’s WebOS.
Although a web version of Google Voice had already existed, Reuters discussed the novelty of today’s release as follows:
But Google described the new version of Google Voice as a “Web app,” noting that it is much more interactive than the previous browser-based version of the service, with the ability to listen to voice mails directly from within the browser and to dial phone numbers on an interactive on-screen keypad.
Whether or not Apple decides to approve of Google Voice’s app is now irrelevant. Information Week quotes Google as saying that “because the Google Voice web app uses advanced features of modern HTML5 browsers, it offers native app-like performance and speed.”
Beyond the battle between Google and Apple, and Google’s marked victory for today, the concept of replacing the potential use of an iphone app with a web based app strikes an interesting concept in the future development of different apps. Cnet discusses this trend in more detail:
The Web application is another sign of Google’s strong desire to encourage people to think of Web-based applications as a ready alternative to native applications. The company has spoken about its plans for Web development at length, and even plans to develop a lightweight operating system based on its Chrome browser as a sort of proof-of-concept for the Web development mindset.
Check out more articles on this topics at the New York Times Blog, Cnet, PCWorld, TechSpot and Information Week.
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