There seem to be a lot of really great programs on and off the app store, but they're just so difficult and time consuming to find. Like everything other than basic music management, iTunes sucks for apps in every way possible. The store is a dire mess and even managing downloaded apps is an epic fail. Simple things like knowing how much you paid for the app, the vendor's web site, the store page for the app - all unavailable/non-existant.

In my search for some apps to replace stock functionality I'm finding that the biggest piece missing to this puzzle is the GLUE to hold it all together well. Since the iPhone's default apps are hard-set to deal with their respective functions, we need a third-party app to be able to set defaults.

For instance, set the default dialer, default sms program, etc. There's a program out now that allows you to set the default browser, but I haven't been able to find anything for the other seemingly hard-coded aspects of the iPhone.

At this time I haven't done anything with Google Voice on the phone yet. The program GV Mobile currently doesn't have any SIP support, so I'd still be stuck with using two different apps to handle calls. I'm thinking of initially using some other SIp app along with Voip.ms and separately using a GV SMS app with GV for only SMS messaging. And a third app for checking voice mail. It would be nice to have all these integrated - and I'm hoping that's what GV Mobile will eventually be able to do.