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Or they could just do what Apple did with iMessage and just basically use the user's mobile phone as the SMS gateway. SMS I send from my laptop actually get routed to my iPhone and sent to my carrier as a normal SMS using my own plan. This also has the big plus the SMS actually will originate from your mobile number (rather than the SMS gateway's number). Can't see why Google could've gone down this route given Apple has done it with huge success...

> What Google should do is just build a shared messaging API that can integrate multiple services into one app.

You mean something like XMPP? (On which Google's original chat service was based).

No. They should stay out of the backend and do something like a more sophisticated notification API that let's you use whatever service from a unified app. They can slip in their own offering but still support others in parallel.

But they pay for Google Voice?