Personally, I transitioned my entire family and friends to use my Google Voice number years ago. GV doesn’t support RCS still, which is annoying, but otherwise it works great. When my phone broke at the beginning of this year I was still able to send and receive texts from everyone.
Obviously, if you don’t trust Google this would be a non-starter though.
Yep. Google Voice is the forgotten step-child that Google only remembers exists once every few years, randomly pushing a wave of updates, and then nothing(don’t let the bi-weekly bug fix updates fool you).
Though in a way I don’t mind, since they’re still providing the service for free, with zero ads, for over a decade. I’m convinced at this point that it’s the pet project of some higher up that likes the service and manages to sweep any maintenance costs under the rug so the bean counters never try to kill it.
Personally, I transitioned my entire family and friends to use my Google Voice number years ago. GV doesn’t support RCS still, which is annoying, but otherwise it works great. When my phone broke at the beginning of this year I was still able to send and receive texts from everyone.
Obviously, if you don’t trust Google this would be a non-starter though.
Wait it doesn’t support RCS? Isn’t google the one heavily pushing RCS?
Yep. Google Voice is the forgotten step-child that Google only remembers exists once every few years, randomly pushing a wave of updates, and then nothing(don’t let the bi-weekly bug fix updates fool you).
Though in a way I don’t mind, since they’re still providing the service for free, with zero ads, for over a decade. I’m convinced at this point that it’s the pet project of some higher up that likes the service and manages to sweep any maintenance costs under the rug so the bean counters never try to kill it.
That’s probably the last remaining service from when Google was cool.