Google Voice Killing SMS Fowarding August 1st, 2021

[RusticPotato]

Summary

Anyone using Google Voice's SMS Forwarding feature received an email today explaining they are removing support for SMS forwarding on August 1st, 2021.

 

 

Quotes

Quote

 

Dear Google Voice user, This email is to inform you that on or after August 1, 2021 we will remove support for the Google Voice feature that lets you automatically forward messages you receive to your linked carrier number. You will still be able to access your messages on the Google Voice apps. What do I need to know? According to our records, you have currently enabled forwarding of your Google Voice SMS messages to one or more linked numbers. In light of spam causing potential issues with SMS forwarding, we are discontinuing the feature and messages will no longer be forwarded to your carrier number. Recommended actions: First, follow these steps to turn off the setting to forward your text messages. After that, you may access your messages on the Google Voice Android or iOS apps or on voice.google.com. Finally, you may also enable forwarding messages to your email in the Google Voice settings. We appreciate your attention to this matter.

Thank you,

The Google Voice Team

 

My thoughts

Killing off one of the best features of google voice, forcing us to use their outdated iphone/android application.  Will have to see if we can still forward them via email to our carriers email to text services.

 

Sources

My email, directly from google. (11:40 AM est)

 

[emosun]

Google voice stopped working entirely in 2016 for me so ignorance is bliss I guess

[Vorg]

I only use it for texting because my celphone is a basic flip phone mainly for emergancies. We have 2 land lines.

[JogerJ]

SMS forwarding is bad. Even though I don't use google voice, still good riddance to this feature. SMS forwarding won't (and should never) catch on if services won't stop using SMS as fallback for sending OTP codes.

[RusticPotato]

12 hours ago, JogerJ said:

SMS forwarding is bad. Even though I don't use google voice, still good riddance to this feature. SMS forwarding won't (and should never) catch on if services won't stop using SMS as fallback for sending OTP codes.

Google voice is a virtual phone service, forwarding SMS to an actual phone is a basic feature I would expect, no?  I agree SMS OTP codes are terrible and unsafe, wish the industry would stop this practice.

[OhioYJ]

While I see how the service can be abused, it still stinks. I've used the service legitimately almost since it's inception. Back when I had a job that let us choose our own phones it let me "park" my personal number in Google voice, so my texts and personal calls still got forwarded to the work phone and I wouldn't lose my personal number.