Greg Kumparak, over at MobileCrunch, published a side by side comparison of our VoiceCentral app with another Google Voice app. We think Greg’s review was definitely fair, but it made us think that we should clarify a few things that went into our design decisions.
We thought the biggest gap with GrandCentral (and also GrandDialer) was that there was no easy way to retrieve voicemails while using an iPhone. The main Grandcentral web app used Flash, which is obviously a non-starter. And the m.grandcentral.com (mobile version) formatted the audio files correctly, but had malformed the html such that it didn’t work with mobile Safari. So with that in mind, the genesis of our app was to fill this main Gap. As Greg could tell, the majority of our initial development was on the Voicemail portion of the app. Having several avid GrandCentral users in our midst (myself included) this was a priority: Fill the main gap, then add features. Adding the ability to dial out was a bonus a la GrandDialer (which was at the time of our initial development still in existence). Then just as we were putting the finishing touches on all of that (literally our last beta run) Google finally releases the next evolution of GrandCentral. Two years after their acquisition they finally took it to the next level, so that sent us back to the drawing board a little…
We made an important decision to retain support for both services. Here’s the reason we thought that was crucial: You can’t seamlessly upgrade to Google Voice with your Google Apps account. So, for example, if I signed up for GrandCentral with my Google Apps provided email address then I couldn’t migrate to Google Voice with that same email address integrated properly. At least not without some annoying workarounds and certainly not as cleanly as a user who has a plain old Gmail address (aka Google Account). For that reason, myself and others I know are first waiting for Google to add these services to Google Apps and make good on this claim.
Also, given what I stated previously (i.e. voicemails being the main purpose and dialing out being a nice-to-have) we thought loading the voicemail screen on first launch was most convenient. However, we have made the startup screen user configurable, with voicemail still the default screen. Also, we do not load voicemails unless the Voicemail tab gets selected, and we do not load recent calls unless the Recents tab gets selected. That speeds up loading a lot — especially if the user chooses the dialer as the default screen.
We had to evaluate one other critical component that Greg touched on in his comments: will Google build their own version of the App? Very good question and we don’t pretend to know the answer. We’ve talked with Google but there’s no clear roadmap at this point. So here was our thought process: they still haven’t built a stand alone Gmail app for the iPhone! They are not necessarily looking to build apps for every service they provide. Plus they are slightly invested in working on the Android platform. That together with their stated interest in webapps led us to think this was a good move.
We let Greg know that SMS and History support was in final testing and would be available momentarily, and that we’d get him a new build shortly. In the meantime, we are playing the typical iPhone developer waiting game.
Finally, it looks like Sean put together a great app at the same time we were cooking up ours. That’s great! Competition inevitably means good things for the consumer! Keep up the good work Sean!
- Kevin
Good stuff Kevin. I think we were in the same boat – not having access to VMs which inspired our apps. Looking forwarding to seeing our apps in the wild.
Looks good. Sean’s announced he’s giving up on his app for a while. I think the wait was too much. One thing that both apps inexplicably lack is a favorites list. Will you add? Seems like it not should take long to do.