It’s really odd they don’t, I’m incredibly curious why.

Like so many other google products they get it going, maybe polish it a bit here and there, and then everyone wants to work on more prestigious stuff. That's why Google has had something like half a dozen iterations of an instant messaging service.

GV wasn't even an internal product - they bought up Grand Central and for a while the business offering was still branded as GC. But at one point, it was integrated into Hangouts. It's so strange...

They don't support any HD voice codecs, so call quality is shit, the integration with iOS is non-existent, the app doesn't sync in the background so every time you open it you have to wait 5-10s before you can use it...you can't even set a ringtone so you can tell a GV call from a cellular call.

GVoice gets forgotten about, I swear.

There are years between updates and then suddenly for like 6 months it'll get a slew of updates, most of which aren't user-facing. Then back to update silence. It's really odd.

I'm still amazed that google hasn't killed it.

I always wondered if it's still alive only because Larry or Sergey use it every day.

I think it only survives because it's so thoroughly overlooked. Probably nobody working on a new messaging/chat/VoIP/video conference/etc. platform within Google wants to nominate Google Voice as the thing they're replacing or reinventing.

I hope it stays that way. I'm almost certain that the minute management remembers it's there, it will get shut down, at least for non-paid (i.e. GSuite) accounts.

My hunch is that google uses it for something internally or there's some random government agency that uses it so Google can't quite retire it yet.

Or Gvoice is some backbone service that something else uses. Idk, but it has to be used for something for Google to have not killed it yet.