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Google Voice was basically almost de-staffed for few years. Then they started to invest into it again around 2017, I don’t remember exact reason why the strateg

• rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  The original acquisition was simply to get their hands on the mounds of voicemail data so they could train their fancy new speech recognition models. It was a prescient move (the Google assistant is still years ahead of its competitors), but they never really had any interest in nurturing that baby. They got what they want from it and let it wither on the vine. Years later, when Apple neared feature parity, they tried to salvage what was left of it, but it was too little to late. They started creating new messaging apps from scratch that didn't catch on, and now they have a flotilla of pseudo-connected messaging products in various states of abandonment. Ironically, I think Apple is the only entity with the power to guide Google out of this mess. If Apple integrated its (encrypted) iMessage platform with the already-existing (encrypted) RCS standard, it'd suddenly be the closest we've gotten to having an interoperable communication standard since XMPP/Jabber in the mid-aughts. Apple won't ever choose to do this on their own of course, but I'm holding out hope that it sees the antitrust storm clouds forming in the distance and starts to take some drastic pro-consumer measures to neutralize that threat.