iPhone World

You all remember the statements Apple and Google submitted to the FCC in response to the inquiry regarding the rejection of Google Voice and Google Latitude from the AppStore, and you all remember what Apple said. What you may or may not remember, is that Google requested parts of its own statement to be made confidential. Recently they have released the complete statement to the public.

In Apple’s release, they claimed Google Voice had not been rejected, it just was still under review and had not been approved.

In the now public statement, Google states

Apple’s representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone. The Apple representatives indicated that the company did not want applications that could potentially replace such functionality.

In Google’s statement, it is claimed that Phil Schiller, the senior VP of marketing, had several meetings, phone calls, and numerous e-mail exchanges with Alan Eustace, Google’s senior VP of Engineering & Research. Of those conversations, on July 7, Schiller told Eustace over the phone, that the app was being rejected because it duplicated core functionality.

Apple has apparently issued a statement in response to the new information in which they say they do not agree with all of the statements made by Google and maintain that they are still reviewing the Google Voice app, stressing it has yet to be rejected. In the spirit of obscurity, they of course did not indicate which statements they are disagreeing with, and to me this sounds like they are just repeating what they said in their initial statement. PR for PRs sake.

So who do you believe? Apple or Google? The part I like about this is that Apple seems up a creek either way. If they did in fact reject the app, then perhaps the FCC will come in and lay the smack down. On the other hand, if they by some miracle actually still reviewing the app, then it is more obvious than ever that their approval process is horribly broken and unreliable, in which case again, we may be hearing more from the FCC. Additionally, if they haven’t been able since July to determine if the GV app uses VoIP technology, then they are looking rather incompetent. Any developer can tell you it would be no large task to solve this mystery, and that just makes Apple look even worse for intentionally appearing to be incompetent.

After all of this, still do not forget that Phil Schiller himself, personally approved the other Google Voice app, GV Mobile, which was also later removed from the AppStore.

I for one am tired of this whole game. No manufacturers, carriers, government agencies, nor any other entity, is going to tell me what I can and can not have on the phone I bought and rightfully own, and can safely say that without the existence of the Dev-Team for the jailbreaks and the work of Saurik most notably on Cydia, I would have never owned an iPhone in the first place, as I’m sure hundreds of thousands of others would agree.

To read Google’s full uncensored response to the FCC, check it out on their website.