Google Voice three-way calls are back — for a price

Oh, Google Voice. How in the world are you still a thing? Google is a company that sometimes seems to love nothing more than shutting down old services, or bundling them up into new ones, yet inexplicably Voice has somehow managed to stand the test of time. It’s desperately in need of some feature upgrades, with RCS support at the top of basically everyone’s list, but it feels like updates to the app are few and far between. This week, we’re lucky enough to actually get one — just not the one we were hoping for.

Back around the start of the year we were conducting one of our APK teardowns on a new Google Voice release, looking for signs of anything new in the works. And sure enough, we spotted a few text strings that made reference to conference calls making a return to Google Voice, after an earlier incarnation of the feature was removed last decade.

Now Google shares that this three-way conference calling mode is indeed coming back to Voice — albeit with one big asterisk attached. Unlike the old version, this new one is restricted to paid Workspace accounts or SIP Link users. Those of us on regular, free Voice are stuck with one-on-one calls.

There is at least a small silver lining there, as Google took the addition of conference calling as an excuse to gussy up Voice’s call interface. While free Voice users won’t be able to take advantage of the new add-caller option the UI adds, we can still appreciate the fresh coat of paint on an app that doesn’t nearly see enough attention of this kind.

It’s not RCS. But we’ll take what we can get.