How about a native Google Voice app now?

[ErnestoBerumen]

Would a native app have access to the contact book? I love using BS, but I really dislike waiting for it to sync contacts, especially when my data signal is weak and I get the occasional "connection lost" popup. I already have google sync set up, so my contacts on my phone are the same as the ones in my google account. A second reason I ask is because I use multiple google voice numbers, but want the same contact list across all my accounts. The way it is right now, I have to find a third party to sync my contact list from one of my google accounts to the others. When I change accounts in BS, I have to wait for the webapp to sync my contact list of over 600 contacts (and growing!) for the current account, place my one or two phone calls, then switch BS back to my primary account and wait for it to load that contact list and contact photos. It's very time consuming. If a native app had access to the address book, all I would have to do is switch GV accounts in BS and load the contact that I want to call from my address book on my phone. No more syncing contacts everytime I switched accounts!

Item #2, I love that the webapp loads voicemails and plays them back, but I'm usually around other people (clients) all day long. I would prefer to listen to my voicemail using my data plan rather than calling my GV number and checking VM while using my minutes, but I always have to call my GV number just so that VMs play through the earpiece. Would a native app allow for listening to VM using the earpiece instead of the speaker? (Even better if you added bluetooth support so that we could listen to our VMs through our BT headsets)

I have a few other refinements, but these two features are a good start and these alone would be worth paying for a BS app!!! Keep up the great work!

[joey]

So it's been very very quite on these forums. Since apps started to go native. Any updates on a native app coming soon?

[Chris]

I was off for a couple of weeks, so the forums have been pretty quiet (aside from the handbag SPAM--I hope that helped with your holiday shopping). Unfortunately, I don't have an official company response on the native app question. We're absolutely swamped with consulting contracts (if you have a lot of enterprise software development and deployment experience, see http://www.riverturn.com/careers.php), and the Black Swan web app version keeps us quite busy without having to deal with Apple.

Going off the record and speaking personally, I'd rather see the client-side portion of Black Swan open sourced and the server-side API publicly documented than to have the extra burden of building, maintaining, and supporting a native app.