Q. How does this new Google Voice MMS support work, and why isn’t Verizon part of it?
(Photo: ponsulak, Getty Images/iStockphoto)
A. Google’s announcement of its calling service’s newfound fluency with multimedia messaging — a brief Google+ posting by product manager Alex Wiesen— left a few things out of focus. Here are the limits to Google Voice MMS that his post didn’t spell out explicitly:
• This news covers inbound MMS, not outbound. That is, if somebody else sends a picture or video message to your Google Voice number, the attached media now appears inline in the Hangouts app. That’s a huge upgrade over that multimedia message vanishing without notice — or the awkward workaround introduced last year, in which the picture or video would be e-mailed separately to you if you also used the right wireless carrier.
• As Wiesen implied when noting that Google Voice MMS reception works with AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Bell Canada, Rogers, Telus, and many more, Verizon Wireless users can’t send picture texts to Google Voice numbers yet. That’s not because Verizon is trying to block Google Voice, PR director Debra Lee said in a phone interview Thursday: We fully expect to support it, and we expect to support it soon.
• But you can also send a picture message from Google Voice — sort of. Google’s Hangouts app for iOS and Android will let you attach a media file and send that to somebody’s mobile number — even a Verizon subscriber’s. But recipients won’t see the photo in the message; instead, they’ll be shown a lengthy link to a Web-hosted copy of it.
• Group messaging via MMS still doesn’t work in either direction.
Wiesen’s closing line —stay tuned for more Google Voice messaging improvements! — suggests group-texting support might come along with fixes for these other remaining shortcomings, but a Google spokesperson wouldn’t go beyond his post.
Getting MMS to work on something that’s not a traditional mobile-phone system isn’t as easy as you might think. The current industry-standard specification governing that kind of handoff only got nailed down in February of 2013, and it requires those outside services to work with each carrier to define the technical details of MMS delivery.
That isn’t something you do by flipping a switch or 20; each company’s network engineers need to spend some quality time with their counterparts. Republic Wireless — a hybrid carrier that routes calls and texts over WiFi whenever possible— was faster than most at completing this process, and it didn’t offer full MMS support until November 2013.
Whenever Google does upgrade its current MMS support, I hope it will break the news in some way more obvious than a G+ posting by an individual employee. Memo to Google: You own a major blogging system; why not try using it more often?
• Tip: Google Voice Internet calling is back in Android
Google was less obscure when it announced the return of a useful Google Voice option: making Internet calls from your GV number in Android. Back in May, it ended official support for third-party apps that had offered that feature without adding it to its Hangouts app for iOS — the move I expected then, considering that the iOS Hangouts app and the Web version of Hangouts already offered Internet calling from Google Voice numbers.
Google finally fixed this weird oversight in September with a major update to the Android Hangouts app — headlined in its official blog, even — that fully integrated Google Voice with that chat and messaging app. As in: If you’ve been persisting with the aging, poorly maintained Google Voice app, you can now dump that.
But to activate Internet calling on Android, updating Hangouts isn’t enough: You need to download and install a separate Hangouts Dialer app too.
You don’t need to touch it after running it once, but if you remove it Internet calls will stop working. Why does Google make you add this extra component when its iOS app doesn’t need a supporting cast? The company worried that making it too easy to place free Internet calls from a core Android app might upset some wireless carriers. As a Google spokesperson put it in an e-mail: We want to be respectful of our partner relationships.
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.