Android Might Finally Be Getting Built-In Visual Voicemail

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Visual voicemail has always been kind of strange on Android.

For the most part*, Google has left it up to carriers to provide a third-party visual voicemail app compatible with their service. Alas, most of these carrier-built apps are buggy garbage.

(* the exception, of course, being if you use a Google Voice number — then you get visual voicemail provided by Google within the Google Voice app. But most people don’t use Google Voice.)

It seems Google is finally prepping to roll out their own built-in solution with Android M.

In a post on the Android Dev Preview bug tracker, a Google engineer pops in to drop four bits of knowledge:

  • They’re working on a visual voicemail implementation for Android M
  • In the preview build meant for developers, it’ll only work on French carrier Orange
  • In the final build of Android M, they expect it to work with T-Mobile.
  • They’re providing infrastructure for carriers to include voicemail text transcriptions (a la Google Voice) if they support such things — though, as it stands, none of their partner carriers actually do.

Alas, T-Mo is the only US carrier mentioned thus far as being supported — which means AT&T, Sprint, Cricket, etc. users might be stuck on third-party apps for a bit longer. But hey, it’s a start, right?

[via AndroidPolice]