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Google Voice may bring back this long-missing feature (APK teardown)
- Google Voice previously supported conference calling, but dropped it years ago.
- A new update to the Voice app adds a few references to conference calls, suggesting it might make a comeback.
- There’s still no further sign of progress on RCS support.
Google is such a big company, working on so many different products and services, that it shouldn’t be any major surprise that some of those pursuits end up getting more attention than others. While that’s great when the stuff you care about is in the spotlight, it can also be enormously frustrating to see beloved apps go ignored. Fans of Google Voice have found themselves in just such a boat, watching the company lead the charge into RCS when it comes to Messages, while failing to bring RCS support to Voice. We still don’t know what Google’s plan is there, but we’re always happy to see an under-appreciated app get some attention, and we may have spotted what could be another Voice feature that Google’s currently working to implement.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We’re talking about conference calls. Right now, there’s no support for three-way calling or beyond baked into Google Voice. That wasn’t always the case, though, and Voice used to announce when you were in the middle of an active call and someone else tried to phone you, giving you the option to press “5” on your keypad and add this new caller to the conversation. That was quietly discontinued about seven years ago, and ever since callers get sent to voicemail when you’re already on the line.
Google Voice also exists in a form that’s targeted at businesses and institutions, and while there’s some cross-service support that ends up functionally achieving similar goals, like reaching out to you over Google Voice to join a Google Meet meeting, that’s not quite the same as Voice doing its own conference calls.
Looking through the recent 2025.01.05.712332733 release of the Google Voice app for Android, we spotted the presence of some new text strings that explicitly mention conference calls:
<string name="conference_call_title">Conference call</string>
<string name="conversation_item_merge_setup_call_icon_content_description">Merged</string>
<string name="conversation_item_merge_setup_call_label_text">Merged into conference</string>Now, that’s not much to go on just yet, but it certainly has our interest piqued. Voice’s old implementation of conference calls functioned independently of the app, and would work on any phone linked to your Voice line. The fact that we’re seeing it pop up like this now, with references to on-screen text strings and icons for merging calls, does make this feel like it could be an an all-new implementation of conference calling in the works, rather than anything like old code accidentally resurfacing.
Even if this is legitimately new conference call support being worked on, we’re very aware of how slow Voice can be to pick up new features, and while a big update has been long overdue, we’re also not kidding ourselves as to the likelihood of us getting one anytime soon. For now, we’ll just have to see if we can spot any further progress along this line, or even (fingers crossed) maybe in the direction of RCS.