It has long standing bugs, such as not providing a correct count of messages in its icon badge:
Google Voice iOS notifications not working for new voicemail - Google Product Forums: "Google Voice iOS notifications not working for new voicemail"Until today, I thought that the problem was that was following the Google "archive, not search" approach. And also that I forward SMS text messages from Google Voice to my iPhone, where I handle them in Messenger, so historically have not gone to Voice to delete or archive them there. I even thought that this might be a feature, since the iPhone Messenger app has no archive feature - if you want to have an uncluttered screen, ya gotta delete them iPhone messages!
But for some reason today I thought that I might try to actually use Google Voice, enabling its badge count, etc.
PROBLEM: my Google Voice badge count is stuck at 1,168.
So, I thought that I might try to archive all of my Google Voice, emptying the Inbox.
PROBLEM: Google Voice has no easy way to manage large numbers of messages all at once. It only allows you to handle one screenful at a time.
In the past I might have handled this with AppleScript. But macOS Sierra has gotten stricter about allowing "accessibility" apps to send keystrokes and mouseclicks and read the screen. So my old scripts don't work, and since I am switching from Mac back to PC, I did not want to spend time learning how to make them trusted.
THEREFORE, I decided to do it by hand.
Well, not quite. I created a keyboard macro that allowed me to select and archive or delete a screenful of Google Voice messages with one button press. And then I started dancing in front of my computer, repeatedly pressing the button.
I created the button using Quadro, a "User Interface Extension" that runs on iPhones and iPads, and allows you to create buttons that execute short sequences of osascript commands or keyboard shorcuts.
PROBLEM: Quadro cannot send mouseclicks. AutoHotKey on a PC can, but I didn't go there.
So I danced. Why "dancing in front of my PC"?
Well, I'm a FitBit addict. I needed my steps. I could not walk around while doing this, but I could stand in front of my PC, hold my iPad in my hands, and press the button while watching the screen, re-pressing every time a screenful of messages was selected and Archived.
PROBLEM: the Gvoice badge count was not the Inbox count. Nor the Unread count. Nor the missed count. Nor...
By this time, I was getting stubborn. So I first archived, and then when that did not work I deleted, every single Google Voice message. In every folder or category.
I am happy to say I got my steps in. More than 4000 steps.
Unfortunately, with my Google Voice account totally empty, I still see 1,168 on the Google Voice badge count.
Uninstall, reinstall. Reboot.
Ah, that did it.
So now my Google Voice account is absolutely empty.
And I reached my step goal for the day.
:-)
?
---
But it sucks that this app, like so many Google products, has an absolutely lousy user interface for any "maintenance" tasks like this.
