Google Voice mobile app for Blackberry and Android
It's been an exciting few months since we announced Google Voice. The feedback from early users has been terrific, and the requests for invites have been flowing in. We started sending invites a few weeks ago and will keep sending them daily.
Context & Ripple Effects
Putting Google services on BlackBerry hardware is established practice for the company: back in January 2006, RIM users gained mobile access to Google Talk and Google Local. What makes this release different is that the app carries Google Voice itself — one number, voicemail, and SMS managed through a Google account rather than the carrier's native calling features.
The launch arrives mid-invite-rollout: Google began issuing Google Voice invitations a few weeks before this post and says it will keep sending them daily on the strength of early-user feedback. So the new clients reach a deliberately constrained user base, with Google controlling the growth valve rather than opening the service outright.
First-order effects
- BlackBerry and Android owners holding invitations can now place calls, check voicemail, and send texts through a dedicated Google Voice app instead of the mobile web.
- Growth scales entirely at Google's pace — the daily invite cadence means demand for the new apps cannot outrun the invitation supply.
Second-order effects
- Building a first-class client for its own Android platform alongside BlackBerry hands Android a differentiating calling service at a stage when every preinstalled Google app matters, and leaves rival smartphone platforms dependent on web access unless they negotiate their own clients.
- For RIM, each Google app deepens a dependence: BlackBerry users get best-of-breed services only as fast as Google chooses to build for the platform, extending a pattern set by the 2006 Talk and Local releases.
Third-order effects
- If number-and-voicemail services keep migrating into device apps, a user's telephony identity attaches increasingly to a software account rather than a SIM card — eroding carrier control over the calling layer and setting up eventual friction with operators and possibly regulators.
- The invite-gated rollout model lets Google seed a communications service gradually and tune abuse and interconnection issues before scale, a playbook that shapes how consumer telecom entrants launch from here on.
The trend: Telephony is shifting from a carrier-owned feature of the network to an app-layer service distributed and gated by software companies, with Google's invite-controlled Voice rollout an early template.