One of the most useful features of Google Voice is the ability to send text messages via the original number on your phone and the messaging application. Unfortunately, Google Voice is now set to miss this message forwarding feature “soon”.
With message forwarding, Google Voice is able to send a copy of your received messages to your operator’s phone number, even allowing you to reply to these messages directly from the SMS app of your choice, without opening the app Google Voice. In a similar process, these messages can also be forwarded to your preferred email address.
An update to the Google Voice app, version 2021.10, started to be released today through the Play Store, and in it, our APK Insight team discovered a line that points to the forwarding of messages to phones being discontinued. So far, the warning does not appear to be active on Android or web applications.
Forwarding messages to linked numbers will stop working soon.
Following this discovery, we found that the Google Voice message forwarding support page has been updated to also share the unfortunate announcement.
Important: The forwarding of messages to linked numbers will stop soon because mobile operators have started to block these messages.
As far as we can understand from the concise warning, some cell phone operators have started to block messages received from the “shadow numbers” that drive the Google Voice forwarding feature. Operator blocking is probably part of ongoing efforts to eliminate calls and spam messages, and Google seems to prefer to stop forwarding than to let it not work with specific operators.
No specific timelines have been shared for when Google intends to turn off this specific feature of Voice. It is important to note that the forwarding of messages by e-mail should continue to function normally and is not affected by this change.
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