fuck these guys
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I’ve used it for the last 3 years, and it costs money, but jmp.chat is a drop in replacement for Google voice. It has clients for all platforms, and features synchronization amongst other things. Give it a shot.
An Fdroid version of the app? Awesome. I’ll check this out. I started out on GV but left years ago when I degoogled.
Edit: How is the call quality?
The call quality is the same as normal cell phone service as far as I can tell.
Is it FOSS? I’m having a difficult time locating its source.
I assumed it was, as I believe the jmp.chat folks have claimed their entire platform is open source, but I could be remembering incorrectly.
How do contacts work? I assume you use cheogram. Does cheogram access your phone’s contacts, or does it have a separate database of contacts?
If I recall correctly, it just syncs with your local contacts, but they also get propagated across platforms. So it’s the best of both worlds.
I use VoIP MS and have two way texting. They are very much KYC, extremely inexpensive, and the service works very well. There is an unofficial app called “voipms sms” on F-Droid that I found buggy but it seems to work for a lot of people. I use Sipnetic for voice calls and sms. So many options for routing calls, dealing with spammers.
If you are looking for more of a private service JMPchat, they do cost quite a bit more but have no interest in your personal information, they just want money.
Twilio, or Vonage, maybe? A lot of the phone stuff as a service thingies are more b2b focused, and a lot less easy to use and integrate than Google Voice (if you’re not using them as a company).
Also saw some people reccomend voip.ms, but I have no personal experience with them.
@VeganCheesecake @pelletbucket probably the most ethical alternative is http://jmp.chat/. I use it and it works pretty well, though not as user friendly as big tech.
JMP is the bees knees, couldn’t be happier with the service. The app takes a little bit of getting used to, but once dialed in it can function right along side your phones main number. Zero issues with it working on websites too, highly recommended!
Voice, YouTube, & occassionally Translate (sorry, your FOSS option doesn’t cover non-European languages well) are the Google servers I can’t quite shake. I almost never use the Voice account but when I do, it’s some required voice call from a US number for a bank or similar—which is very important, to make these calls, but it is so infrequent that I can’t justify paying for an entire service for 1–2 (usually very long) calls annually.
Yeah, I’m generally overseas and many things need a US number for 2fa. It’s the only thing that I still need it for. Translate as well for Japanese.
You’d love to see more things adopt 2FA like FIDO2 or TOTP, but too many things go to like Symantec to hide your keys from you or roll some shitty in-house, in-app version of 2FA that you can’t keep separate from a mobile device–which is a device like to break since it usually goes a lot of places with you.
See voip.ms for voice. I can’t speak for specific non-European languages, but I’ve been quite happy with LibreTranslate for my on the fly needs. Setup was dead easy too. (And if you see a lack of coverage for particular languages, obviously your contributions to improve that would be welcome)
Well I live, operate, & travel around Asia so English is the only European language to know—which I don’t need help with. I use Yandex Translate primarily just to partition my data usage between servers (image search is the only other thing I use Yandex for), but its offerings aren’t quite as broad for languages like Lao & the quality of translations is slightly worse. All of the European languages are basically the same if you squint your ears so it is no surprise the FOSS tools can handle something easy, but Western-centrism in tech isn’t a new thing.
Seconding @Tazerface@sh.itjust.works 's suggestion of voip.ms.
I throw them a lil cash maybe once per quarter or so, they maintain a bunch of numbers that I may or may not utilize at any moment, but are just too good to give up, and anything I’m not actively using is set up to send inbound SMS to my email - that way I don’t lose access to multi-factor codes and such, but I’m not trying to juggle a bunch of numbers in some app or other either.
Dirt cheap, ‘just works,’ and they even made porting from GV easy.
Also, by the same token, to de-google your email, I’m a big fan of Migadu. Same sort of scenario - I prepay a lil bit once a quarter or so, have catch-alls set up so I don’t miss random crap from emails I’ve forgotten I created/used a decade ago, etc. A nice, simple solution that also plays well with on-the-fly outbound email addressing, Thunderbird for day to day needs, and webmail.
There tech support is also fantastic. I had an issue yesterday morning, it was fixed by the afternoon.
What do people use Google Voice for? Phone calls from PCs?
I use it as my primary phone number so that nobody has my real one.
Ah, so that you can easily replace it if it ends up on some spam list?
it is useful for that, but I started it as a layer against sim swapping
PCs from phone calls
Phone calls from PCs?
it doesn’t even do that anymore. lol
jmp.chat has been great for me.
How is the call quality?
Very good. Sometimes it takes a second to connect but that’s the only issue I’ve ever had.
Cool I might get a test number to play around with before I consider porting my main one.
No such thing tbh. None of the usual “extra phone number” services are any better.
Curious what specific problem has you bailing though
they’re fucking with my ability to text. friends I’ve been texting for years, my doctor, my outgoing messages are suddenly flagged as spam and support is being an asshole. Google support is always an asshole
In years of using GV, group texts never worked correctly for me, and generally broke in unpredictable ways - some recipients would get some msgs, others would get other msgs, and others might just get dropped entirely. It was both weird and completely untenable for anything even remotely important.
Yes, remotely important business does get conducted via group text once in a while - is it ideal, probably not, but I meet companies/individuals I work with where they are in the mutually easiest format. That only works if I can rely on the SMS solution in the first place, though.
For a limited period of time necessary to resolve your customer support issue, you agree to allow Google customer support to access data about and associated with your Google product and account, which may include product information such as IMEI, Serial Number, country in which your product was purchased, account history and limited historical usage data.
The data accessed will be used to improve your customer service experience, to troubleshoot issues with this product, promotion history and for fraud prevention. Google will handle this data as described in Google’s https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US. Do we have your consent?
wat
It’s the copy and paste thing support posts or says every fucking times you try and talk to them. I guess the down voters think I’m pro this weird act they do to make it feel like you have control of your data.
I mean, Gmail isn’t necessarily a bad email service. Most people on here probably just want to avoid giving Google more data about them. Whether other VoIP Providers are better on privacy - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s irrelevant.
None of the other options do what Google voice does. There’s no direct equivalent. Not that I’ve ever run across, and I’ve looked.
Jmp is the closest, and it still doesn’t have feature parity all the way.
As far as function, they’ve got a nice little package all wrapped up and easy to use. Aside from the group text thing I mentioned elsewhere, it’s a pretty slick implementation. But for a user base of one, with privacy concerns, I’d rather use something that’s a bit rougher around the edges yet more configurable, and more private.
From where I sit, it’s a pretty decent email service from both user-side and admin-side, including for biz use in nearly any size org.
It’s all about the data, and not wanting to be the product for me - I have no direct beef with their implementation or abstractions of admin-side details. I just would rather pay a relatively small amount of money than pay with my data.
