Quote from: Usetheforceobiwan on April 20, 2014, 04:55:04 PM
Were trying to figure out what happens to the GV portal over here:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r29192152-What-Happens-to-the-Google-Voice-Portal-After-May-14th
There is an incredible amount of useless misinformation and speculation on that thread. It's like the blind men trying to describe a camel.
As one of the handful of "Top Contributor" volunteers over on the Google Voice forum, I work with the Google Voice engineering and program staff. Here is what I can disclose and discuss publicly.
I have posted some version of this information elsewhere on this forum, but it's so hard to search, and there are so many redundant threads that I'll just try again. I am doing this to try to cut through so much rumor and flat-out incorrect information on the web, and help people understand what's changing and what's not changing:
Google
Voice was, and is now, in improved form, the inbound telephone call and voicemail message management system that Google purchased from GrandCentral. It is not, and never has been, a VoIP telephone company (despite somewhat misleading advertising by sellers of devices or apps that use unauthorized methods of access to the service). The GV platform is designed to forward calls via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Contrary to many peoples' misunderstanding, the official mobile Google Voice apps, from Google, for iOS and Android have never, and to this day, still do not support VoIP calling; they use the mobile phone's voice carrier's network (GSM, CDMA, and soon VoLTE).
Google Voice relied on a companion product, Google
Chat and its underlying VoIP protocol, XMPP, to make and receive calls over the internet. GV phone numbers could be used as caller ID for outbound Chat calls, and Chat could be used as one of a GV user's forwarding destinations. A related, but irrelevant product, Google
Talk also used XMPP. Think of Google Talk as the competitor to AOL's AIM and MSN's and Yahoo's similar IM client applications of that heyday.
OBi devices do not interact directly with Google Voice; they interact with Google Chat via XMPP.Now, here is the key message: Google Chat/Talk and their XMPP protocol, are being shut down permanently on May 15th. This isn't a rumor; it's on track to happen. It has been widely communicated by Google to third parties who Google knew were using XMPP clients. Obihai was one of them. Important to understand: Google never, ever, authorized, supported, or recommended any third-party use of XMPP clients. It just had other things to deal with, and let it slide.
Why is Google doing this? You can ignore all the gossip, emotional rants and speculation on the web; it's just pointless, and in some cases wildly off-the-mark. Google is moving all internet audio/video communications to a newer platform, WebRTC. Why? Look at the bigger picture of how the use of computers has evolved. We've gone from an environment where the vast majority of people used desktop Microsoft Windows PCs, to a highly mobile, highly heterogeneous environment of Windows, Linux, Apple Mac OS X, Apple iOS, Google Chrome OS, Google Android, Windows Phone, etc. It used to be painful, but doable, to maintain application development for Windows and Mac PCs. There are simply not enough skilled programmers and security professionals and support people to maintain platform-specific apps anymore. The security risks and zero-day hacking sophistication have grown enormously, and the cycle-time for new OS versions has dramatically reduced.
This is why the large majority of app development is moving to the web or "cloud". Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are all basing their futures on platform-agnostic, web-browser-based services. Google and Mozilla worked together with an open software development community to create WebRTC. This is a set of APIs that are "baked-into" their web browsers. So now, it is extremely easy to build, test and maintain communications apps, simply by using the browser as the user interface. This is the same concept as building accelerated graphics (GPU), encryption, application (HTML5) and other advanced functions into the browser: you don't need to write a pile of low-level code to perform communications; it is already written; just use it via standard API calls.
So, for those reasons, Google's replacement for Chat/Talk/XMPP is WebRTC and Hangouts.
Google Hangouts already supports making and receiving VoIP telephone calls on the web browser (laptop/desktop Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Chrome OS), and on Apple iOS devices.
Google Hangouts for Android will also be getting telephone calling capability soon.
Google already stated that their plan is to migrate and integrate Google Voice user interface functions into Hangouts apps (mobile and web), but
the Google Voice service is not being eliminated at all, and, aside from no more XMPP, it will continue to operate on May 16th just as it did on May 14th.