The saints be praised. After loosening and clarifying its App Store policies last week, Apple is proving that things–some of them, at least–have changed. A third-party Google Voice app called GV Connect is in the App Store, almost fourteen months after Apple removed all third-party Google Voice apps and refused to approve Google’s own one. Sean Kovacs, developer of GV Mobile, one of the programs bounced last year, says that Apple has told him his app will return tomorrow.

GV Connect is $2.99 and a no-brainer for Google Voice users: It makes it nearly as easy to use Google Voice for outgoing calls as it is to make a garden-variety call, and provides easy access to Google Voice voicemail and SMSes. It’s far more convenient than the Web-based stopgap that Google itself released back in January. And GV Mobile looks like it may be even better. (Me, I’ll buy both.)

Just for the sake of principle, I’d like to see Google formally resubmit its own Google Voice app so that Apple has the opportunity to accept it. But as a practical matter, these third-party apps should give us Google Voice users what we need on the iPhone. Which is a big deal: Whenever someone asks me how the iPhone compares to Android, the Google Voice situation has near the top of the list of things I bring up. Looks like those days are over.

 
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