The iPhone Guru - All things iPhone, made clear

UPDATE: In a related post John Gruber of Daring Fireball has this to say:

[Update 1:40 pm: Well, so much for my speculation. A reliable little birdie has informed me that it was indeed AT&T that objected to Google Voice apps for the iPhone. It’s that simple.]

To those that would say that it confuses them that AT&T would allow the Google Voice apps to exist on the Android and Blackberry app stores, yet pull strings to ban it from Apple’s store, one only has to consider the fact that there are over 45 million iPhone users, using an app store that is 95% bigger than Androids to see why AT&T might be afraid of the impact that GV might have on it’s revenue, and it’s network bandwidth.

In what is being interpreted by pretty much the entire internet community as a complete dick move, Apple has killed the official Google Voice App that had been heading to iPhones. Yes, the Google Voice app made by that Google. The official app follows closely on the heels of an alternate GV Mobile client,  by Sean Kovacs. Apple’s reason for rejection has basically been something along the lines of, “the iPhone already has an app for that.”  Meaning that the Google Voice App does things that the iPhone is already capable of. But is this really why it was rejected?

In the end, it’s actually fairly easy to see what the driving force behind this move is. Apple has a close partnership with AT&T, Google Voice allows users to switch their number cheaply, send free SMS messages and use incredibly cheap long distance plans. Any app that hits AT&T that close to the pocketbook was destined to be kicked off of the App Store island.

Google has been unable to excercise it’s considerable weight in the matter, and now seems to be resigned to implementing the Google Voice feature set in a web app. They have already done this for their previously (assumed) rejected Google Latitude app, sort of a Loopt type service.

The real impact on app developers comes from the question, if Google can’t get an app approved, how can I?