Drop the phone but not the number

Are you guys ready for me to criticize Google again? This is a small one, but still a criticism

My wife walks around every day with two iPhones. She has a 4S that we bought her when it came out, and a 5 that she got from her work. Naturally, this makes no sense, so she might as well carry around the most recent phone, if possible. Plus, why not let her work pay her phone bill, and drop that big monthly charge?

The problem is that it's so tough to let go of that personal cell phone number that she's had for over 10 years.

The only thing I've thought of is pretty simple: just port the number to Google Voice, and add her work phone as the sole phone on the account. That way she still gets calls and texts to both numbers.

But here's where I [partly] bitch about Google: the Google Voice MMS problem. I only partly blame them because MMS is a bit of a mess and from what I've read differs from carrier to carrier in how they handle it, and none of the carriers want to help Google out (except for Sprint, apparently). I would be completely happy if every MMS I received got turned into an email, but no, instead it just goes *poof* and disappears forever.

For me, I thought that was okay. I don't have anyone who sends me an MMS, and barely anyone who texts me. Then I found out that in order to do group SMS that other people could reply-all to, Apple made it so group SMS's got turned into an MMS when they're sent out. Consequently, the one guy who texts me would send a group text to my wife and I, and she would get it and I wouldn't, but none of the three of us knew it!

So now if that friend sent that text, neither of us would get it, and while we would probably figure that out, it certainly isn't good!

So what would you guys recommend? Should we just chance it, and let people know that they shouldn't send MMS's or group texts to her, at least not on that phone number? Is there some other service/strategy we should look into?

A dual-SIM adapter for the iPhone, like this, or this one eg.? (I'm sure there a lots of others).

That would be a good way to have both lines going to one phone, but we'd have to pay for both subscription plans, wouldn't we?

I found an iPhone 5 clone in China that runs android and has 3 sim slots...

I really wanted to buy it...

You could port your phone number to a voip service and just set it to forward to the new phone. That would run about $25 / month. You could even call out on that number using the voip app.

Do any VOIP services handle SMS and MMS messages properly?

I am also interested in prying my phone numbers away from my mobile provider, but who to transfer to is the harder question, when both SMS and MMS are important.

Note: When both sender and recipient(s) of a text/multimedia message are using Apple devices and have allowed the feature, the messages are in fact transfered using iMessage and normal mobile data, not the mobile carrier's SMS system.

I can't offer a good solution to your problem, but I can say that you've explained why I've mysteriously not received some text messages in the past. Maybe the rumored forthcoming Google Babble grand-unified chat system will tackle this.

Yeah, I was hoping the same thing.

And I'm glad my research could benefit another. It took forever to figure out what was happening, because it was my understanding that group SMS messages were pretty normal, and just sent as texts. I guess Apple, in an understandable method to get around the limitations of the technology, turned group texts to MMS so recipients could reply-all.

What I'm unclear about is why there's no way for Google to set up something that at least notifies one of the parties that a message hasn't gone through...


That's a good point. However, if we make the switch, my wife will be using Google Voice, which takes over the responsibilities of handling texts, so she won't get those messages.

I'm also uncertain if it does this on a group text where one of the recipients is not using an iPhone. I wonder. Perhaps it does iMessage between the people who can use it.

We're leaning towards going forward with the Google Voice port. There's only a handful of people who send her messages, and we can tell those people the situation. It should be fairly simple to adapt...

Has anyone here experienced how Google Voice operates on an iPhone? I'm curious about this. On Android, it's fairly invisible due to how tied in it is. Google Voice handles all my calls in and out. As far as anyone calling me (or receiving calls from me) is concerned, they don't know my actual cell phone number. When I receive texts and voicemails, I just go through the Google Voice app like it was my messaging app.

I'm assuming it's less tied in on the iPhone. I suppose it's good enough that she receives the calls coming into her personal number, but I have no idea what text messages to her Google Voice number will look like on her phone...

Speaking of which, here's a typically poor example of a Google "help" page.

Perhaps someone could help me parse the end of that "help" article. To me it seems like they're saying "Google Voice uses push notifications on the iPhone to alert you to new text messages. If you enable push notifications, you won't get alerted of new text messages."

Huh?

The only thing I can think of is that they meant "disable."

True. But I figured, since one phone is for work, your wife's employer would cover one of those plans.

It works similarly to Android. The only big difference is you need to use the dialer in the Google Voice iPhone app to place outgoing calls using your Google Voice number. There is no integration between Google Voice and the stock iPhone dialer.

SMS does get pushed to the Google Voice iPhone app. There must be a typo on that help page.

What about MMS ? Works inbound and outbound?

MMS does not work with Google Voice unless the sending party is a Sprint subscriber.

1.5 months until Google I/O. Maybe then something new.