Apple, put GV Mobile back! You're becoming more like AT&F******T all the time.
To quote Denis whats-his-name from Saturday Night Live, “I don’t want to go off on a rant here but….”
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The iPhone rocks. The iPhone 3GS rocks even more. AT&F******T (AT&FT) is absolutely awful but people put up with them in order to use the iPhone. Google, while not always perfectly un-evil, does their part by making some cool stuff and giving it away at low cost, like Google Voice which I’m liking more and more. Then you have app store developers, a hardy lot who write cool apps and who deserve all the credit and money they can collect.
So after 14 calls to AT&FT, I went from a pre-paid plan (we don’t support those on the iPhone OS 3.0) to a monthly pre-paid plan (oh, sorry, we just cut off your data plan because we’ve decided not to support data on that plan with OS 3.0 and shouldn’t have sold you the first plan) to a 2 year contract (which I despise since I hate them already) but I was okay with it because I have Google Voice in front so even when AT&FT screwed up my phone number transfer and killed my old cell phone number (exactly as I predicted they would), I was fine because I had only given out my Google Voice number. Google hadn’t gotten around to releasing a Google Voice client yet but a savvy young entrepreneurial developer named Sean Kovacs saw an opportunity and wrote GV Mobile. Finally a single button so I can dial from my address book but make long distance calls at 1 cent per minute instead of at $2.50 or $1.00 or whatever price AT&FT wants to charge for international long distance on my current plan. It was a nearly perfect solution.
So today, Apple and AT&FT have killed it. They have removed the app from the app store and broken its connection so it no longer works. Why? Because it will “confuse users with the similar dialing functionality.” That is such corporate double-speak bullshit. I have a dialpad in my skype application and that’s not confusing. I could dial from my address book with GV Mobile and that was a lot less confusing than looking in my contact app, then remembering the number, then dialing Google Voice, then inputting the number.
This is completely disingenuous and was no doubt prompted by AT&FT feeling like it was too easy for Google Voice users to bypass their usurious long distance dialing charges and pay 1 cent per minute instead of whatever they want to charge. The press release should say, “Dear users, AT&T is making us pull your pants down and hold them there so they can screw you again because you’re bypassing their incredibly profitable long distance charges.”
Well, frack you AT&FT, I will continue to phone Google Voice and dial remote and I will continue to own cell phones in other countries so I pay you as little as possible in the next 2 years. And by then hopefully Android phones won’t suck so bad so I will have a replacement for my iPhone and your insanely poor network.
In the meantime Apple, stop being AT&FT’s bitch and put the GV Mobile app back in the app store. Jobs, you have bigger balls than they do. You’ve SAVED that company. Stop kow-towing to them. And while you’re at it, tell them to stop fracking around and fix internet tethering. If they’re going to charge $30/mo for data, then they can suck it up and absorb the costs of tethering like the other iPhone telcos around the planet.
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