Yes­ter­day, we saw a Von­age app hit the App Store, which seemed to go against Apple and AT&T’s pre­vi­ous stance that VoIP apps that work over the 3G (and 2G) net­work would not be allowed in the App Store. Turns out there’s been a pol­icy change. AT&T has just announced that it will no longer restrict VoIP apps that use its net­work on the iPhone, a move which is long over­due con­sid­er­ing that it was already allow­ing these on other phones. […]

But don’t be fooled. A rumor ear­lier today about the move sug­gested that AT&T was think­ing about let­ting Google Voice on the iPhone along­side Skype, Von­age, and other VoIP apps. There’s two prob­lems here. First, Google Voice isn’t actu­ally a VoIP app. Sec­ond, AT&T did not have any­thing to do with the Google Voice rejec­tion (or non-approval, what­ever), that was all Apple.

Apple has never said it blocked the Google Voice app because it was a VoIP app (which would have fallen under its agree­ment with AT&T to do so), it blocked it because it said it emu­lated many of the fea­tures of the actual phone por­tion of the iPhone, and would con­fuse cus­tomers. That’s pretty much crap, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that the Von­age app which was just approved also looks like the iPhone’s phone portion.

Full Story at: http://www.techcrunch.com/

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