Why VoIP on Android Is Better Than on the iPhone

In the war of the smartphone platforms, there are two camps - power users and those who like to get by with the best native experience. Historically, power users have always been the ones demanding more from their technology and while regular users don't need all that advanced functionality, some of the power user habits always trickle down to the rest of us and eventually become mainstream functionality. The PC is a great example of something being not a product, but a platform. No one buys a laptop or a computer for the native experience. The true value lies in what you install on it - Games, word processing software, browsers, image processing etc.VoIP on smartphones has so far been a power user functionality. And for this reason, Android is the better platform than the iPhone. While its true that the quality of applications and the sheer variety is great on the Apple store, third party applications are not given the same treatment as native applications. Ideally, you want the ability to customize your phone to the same extent you can customize your PC. Imagine not being able to replace Internet Explorer on your laptop and being forced to use whatever comes pre installed!
There are many VoIP apps on the iPhone market. Applications such as Truphone, Fring, Talkatone etc all enable us to use services such as Google Voice or our own SIP providers to make calls over the Internet either for free or by paying low fees the way users of services like Skype have been doing for years. But because of the limitations of third party apps on the iPhone, a VoIP application will always be a second class service.
Take Google Voice for example. Using the Google Voice app on the iPhone, you can make outgoing calls through the service in such a way that the person on the other end will see your GV number and not your regular iPhone number. That's great, but the functionality is only half way. When you want to receive calls using a third party dialer it runs into problems because the iPhone doesn't allow apps to run in the background. There are ways around this using what Apple calls "push notifications" but they're clumsy and run into a number of practical issues including the loss of wifi when the device turns off.
For true VoIP Integration with a smartphone, Android is the only way to go. The ability to replace the native dialer, run apps in the background and implement programs to keep wifi alive are all integral to the VoIP ecosystem.
Bhagwad is an expert consultant on Advanced Business VoIP Services. He also specializes in the Best VoIP Phone Systems.

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