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I use it exclusively, and it is perfect for me, mostly. I can text from any of my android devices, or any device with an internet connection almost entirely reliably. Here's the foibles though: * No extended MMS support AT ALL. This means no pictures, no participating in group messages from iphone users, and most critically, all text messages sent or received over 160 characters aren't automatically concatenated like on the iphone and in the stock android messaging app, but instead chopped up into several 160 character messages. * Quirky reliability. It's been getting slowly better, but there are small issues occasionally that are pretty rage-inducing. For example, before February of 2012, there was no queuing for SMS messages. If you tried to send a message and it failed, (which happens a lot) too bad, you got to try again. So when they did implement it, (way after the introduction of the product, I might add) it was slow and argumentative as to which messages actually got sent out and when. * Product support. Lusting after a basic new feature for GV? Having an issue where some messages are duplicated 4 times and sent to everyone in your address book with the same first name as the recipient? (it happened to me. The solution was to name problem contacts things like John1, John2, etc. until an unspecified update fixed it) Just curious about the future of the product? Too bad. You will be lucky to get a minor update a year later which addresses a complementary issue or concern. No amount of support questions, bug reports, emails, or even community outrage will get anything out of Google concerning GV. It took them months to update it to the ICS app standards, and they did so without any warning or response to users who had been begging Google to fix the buggy Gingerbread/Froyo-imbued app since Honeycomb had come out. For some reason Google is hell-bent on being tight lipped on this particular product and none of its users have any idea if it will even continue existing for the foreseeable future. Now that Google has used it to datamine a bunch of voicemails for transcription data, it feels like we're just along for the ride on this product that we rely on every day. |
Google has to keep their costs down since GV doesn't make any money. You're not paying for the calls, you can't really complain about the quality. If you care about quality, setup a really simple PBX with call forwarding and connect it to flow route. Better quality and under a penny per minute.
Google isn't going to devote time to fixing the existing GV product, they want a new GV product, but there are infrastructure integration problems within google (grandcentral had a robust telephony stack but I imagine elgoog had quite the time integrating their switch into the infrastructure fabric 'google-ifying'). They likely see no benefit to improving the old platform as its just a loss leader, and increasing use of GV increases the losses. It's an almost Faustian bargain; buy Grandcentral, control the patents for VM transcription with an iron fist and never innovate.
It's both terrible and strategically correct in a view of absolute profits and losses (one that google admittedly rarely operates in).