An iPhone App to Sidestep AT&T (opens in new tab)

Google voice denied and Line2 accepted? Interesting steve...

Taking bets on how soon this app will be ejected from the AppStore. Especially considering:

The Line2 app is a carbon copy, a visual clone, of the iPhone’s own phone software.

For those of you wondering if Apple is going to remove this from the App Store: they almost certainly won't.

Line2 was first submitted to the App Store in August 2009, which was really bad timing because it was in the middle of the Apple/Google Voice storm. A month later it was approved (after the founder pestered Apple a lot). And I'm pretty sure the version Pogue is reviewing was actually released last month (http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/line2-google-voice/).

In other words, none of this is news to Apple, though it's clearly hypocritical on their part. Also, no way Apple would pull this after a Pogue review — he'd probably write about it, and he's proven before with his 'Take Back The Beep' campaign that he can incite quite an uproar.

How is this substantively different from the Skype iPhone application, with an in-bound phone number? The major usability barrier to me there is the inability to have Skype run in the background on the phone (reasonably so, since it would kill battery life); does Line2 somehow work around this?

Edit: Never mind, I should have finished reading the article before posting. Line2 routes calls through the cellular network when the app isn't running.

I use it on my iPhone, dropped my unlimited plan to 450 minutes, saves $30/month Toktumi is only $15/month so saves $180/year and now I can actually use my iPhone at home. Very cool app, going to test on my iPod one of these days too.

I'm happy that iPhone owners now have something even better than Google Voice. But how can Apple possibly defend the Google Voice rejection now? I hope the FCC gets involved again. I'm offended on Google's behalf.

Damn Line2 does exists, for one moment while reading the article, I thought the author was joking and talking about that imaginary VoIP app of everyone's dream. Then I searched in iTunes and it's a reality.

This is great publicity for Line2, assuming Apple doesn't decide to remove their app from the App Store due to the attention this article will bring to them.

link to the app in itunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/line2-2-lines-1-iphone/id3191...

Oh this will be interesting on the 3G iPad. $30/mo 3G VOIP?

To read the article, you'd think VoIP was a completely new, unheard of technology.