Easiest way to Enable Google Voice Push Notification on iPhone - Revised [Tutorials]

Easiest way to Enable Google Voice Push Notification on iPhone – Revised [Tutorials]

By Alok Saboo on October 7th, 2009

Our earlier tutorial on enabling Google Voice push notifications on iPhone/iPod generated significant interest. The earlier method required a lot of effort and an always-on computer that could push the messages to your iPhone. Despite the obvious issues, there was a huge interest – well the savings were significant. Today, I will present an extremely simple method to receive FREE text messages on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Most importantly, this does not require you to jailbreak your device. Yes, you can completely replace your AT&T text plan without jailbreaking your device.

You would need (actually nothing much),

Any iDevice, i.e., iPhone, iPod Touch, with internet connection (3G/WiFi/EDGE)
Prowl
And obviously, a Google Voice account

So, lets get started!!

Step 1- Forward Google Voice SMS to your email

Google Voice recently introduced the feature wherein you can forward the SMS that you receive in your account to the email address that is tied to the Google Voice account.
So, let us enable the forwarding of the SMS to our email.
Log in to your Google Voice account and go to Settings –> Voicemail & SMS.
Enable SMS forwarding.

Step 2 – Create a Prowl account and Install Prowl on your iPhone

Next, you need to create a Prowl account. If you do not have one, you can sign up for a new Prowl account here.
While you are at the Prowl website, generate an API key (under Settings) and copy it (we will need it shortly).
You will also need to install Prowl (iTunes link) on your iPhone. Setup your prowl account on your iPhone so that it is ready to receive push notifications.

Step 3 – Send Push notifications to iPhone

Great, now you are at the final step. At this point, you should be able to receive the SMS sent to your Google Voice account on your email address. Now we only need to push that to our iDevice (iPhone or iPod Touch).
Prowl provides an excellent feature, wherein you can just forward notifications to the Prowl iPhone web service via email.
You need to forward the messages to the address – API_KEY@mail2prowl.de, where the API key is the one you copied in the previous step.
To make the system more efficient, I recommend creating a new filter in your Gmail account so that the SMSs forwarded from your Google Voice account are automatically pushed to your iPhone.
Here’s a simple filter that I used. Forward all messages from – @txt.voice.google.com to your Prowl address – API_KEY@mail2prowl.de. You can obviously play with the filter so that it suits your purpose. If you do not want the SMS to remain in your inbox, you can even Delete it.
The above filter will only forward (and push) the text messages. If you want to PUSH all the Google Voice notifications, then in the from box, put @txt.voice.google.com OR voice-noreply@google.com

Please note that this method is completely secure, i.e., your messages are not intercepted by any one. You forward your Google Voice notifications to your Gmail Account, and then forward them to your Prowl account. You do not have to give out your Google account credentials to any third party. Also, the method is extremely fast. There is no polling – messages are pushed, so the notifications arrive within a few seconds.

That’s it!! Now you are all set to receive your text messages (SMS) for free on your iPhone. You could combine this method with previously mentioned SMS Global.AQ to even send cheap SMS and completely eliminate AT&Ts texting plan. No need to pay $$$ to AT&T for the exorbitant texting plan.

Let me know if you have any trouble with this. If this tutorial helped, do not forget to spread the word!!

Related posts:

Chris Peterson
Works great for me. The only thing is that I wish I could edit the notification 'pop-up' so that it doesn't include the email address as it is so long because of the API inclusion. Thanks for the tip.

Daniel
Hi, so i successfully completed all of the steps and everything seems to be working, but I still get the notifications from my sms application, therefore, how is this saving me from not receiving the text messages there? i thought that was the goal...

Nathan
I think it's probably because you haven't registered your phone number with textfree. Once you have registered on textfree's website, you will be given a confirmation code. You need to enter that confirmation code on textfree's settings in the iphone app to get your sms in the iphone app.

Btw, Google Voice just released their HTML 5 powered webapp today (see - 'http://lifehacker.com/5456757/google-voice-arrives-on-iphones-with-html5+powered-webapp') which pretty much solves most of the problem. Although, I have to check to see they have enabled push notification for the Iphone.

Happy Texting!

Alok Saboo
Do you mean, when someone sends a text message to your Google Voice number, you get it through your SMS application? How is that possible? I am sure there is something wrong here. The idea, as you pointed out, is to save money by not receiving text on your cell phone directly and it has worked for everyone.

Just check in your settings if your text messages are forwarded to your cell phone. In that case, you can remove that option.

Nathan
There is a simpler way without Prowl for Ipod Touch / Iphone using Textfree Lite (a free app with push notification).
1) Install TextFree Lite - A free app on appstore. Create an account on their website which will give you a email address of the form "xxxxx@textfree.us".
2) Create a new filter in your Gmail account so that the SMSs forwarded from your Google Voice account are automatically pushed to your Textfree account:
a) Create a filter to forward all messages from "@txt.voice.google.com" to "xxxxx@textfree.us". To ensure that they are searchable on gmail, you can attach a label to the filter as well. I usually use the label "SMS".

Rama
You don't need to bookmark google.com/voice...just reply to those emails and they will automatically sms back to the sender. Try it..it works!

Chris Haseler
Thanks!

It is possible to set up free sms / texting without using any non-Google services, though. It might also be easier this way, because you only have to have one account.
Simply set up the GV account as before, so it forwards to your email. Then, set up a Google Sync account (Instructions here: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer...). The SMS will be forwarded to your email, and your email will be instantly pushed to your iDevice, with no accounts other than your Google one. Just add a bookmark to google.com/voice on your iDevice's home screen, and you're set!

Alok Saboo
Chris, that indeed is possible. However, there is a problem with that arrangement - you will receive notifications for everything in your mailbox, which can be quite annoying. But if you can live with that, this is a great suggestion.!!

Eric
It's somewhat working for me. Notifications are arriving to Prowl, but I have to click on its icon to force it to run for me. In other words, I don't get an automated push notification that I've just received an email. Any help?

Alok Saboo
You may have disabled the notifications for Prowl. Go to Settings > Notifications and check for the notifications settings for Prowl. If you have not disabled the notifications there, you should see the badges like you see for your regular text messages. Let me know if this helps.

jeremytaylor
I had the same experience as Eric. I've gotten prowl to receive the message, but it does not "push", I must launch prowl to view the messages. I've verified that push is turned "on" for prowl and I do receive push messages from the native SMS application. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

Alok Saboo
Thats interesting!! I have never seen that happen. Does it happen with a particular service or Prowl just not pushing anything? Have you tried reinstalling Prowl?

jeremytaylor
Seems to be pretty much all apps besides the native sms, although lately text free unlimited has worked sporadically. It helps if I boot into safe mode and then open the app, which allows it to reregister teh app, and then reboot into standard mode. However, it doesn't seem to work very long and not for prowl.

Any thoughts?

Thans.

jeremy

PS: yes, I have reinstalled several times. Thanks again for your time and thoughts!

Alok Saboo
Guess, Google is playing around with its notification system and the developers are not able to catch up. Recently, I noticed that Google now allows you to forward notifications to other email addresses. We should soon see some equilibrium.

Meanwhile, I will keep trying it out and let you know if I have a solution...

jeremytaylor
Hey Alok,

I used the most recent Blackra1n (RC3) and the iphone firmware 3.1.2 (also, I used the unlocking program in blackrain called "snow" I think). No "push fix" installation was necessary, as my push worked from the start this time. Please note that I do have AT&T as a carrier and I DID update the carrier settings AFTER restoring my iphone to 3.1.2, but BEFORE using Blackra1n to jailbrake (I probably didn't need to do the unlock, since I have AT&T, but I just followed the walk through). Anyway, itunes offered to update carrier settings and I said yes before installing blackra1n.

In sum:
1) I downloaded Blackra1n RC3 from here: Download;
2) The fresh copy of the iphone firmware I got from here: Download (once it was downloaded, I pressed the option key while clicking on "restore" in the Iphone summary screen in itunes; from there I just selected the firmware I just downloaded)
3) the step-by-step I followed here: Tutorial Link.

I hope this helps.

Please let me know if you have questions:

Jeremy

Alok Saboo
Jereme, thanks a lot for the detailed instructions. However, the links got lost. Can you provide me the links, so that I can update in your comment? Thanks once again...

jeremytaylor
Hey Alok,

Sorry about that broken links, I'll try again:

1) Here is the tutorial:
http://www.redmondpie.com/jailbreak-iphone-3.1....

2) Here is the firmware link (link at bottom, offered for each kind of iphone/ipod touch):
http://www.redmondpie.com/download-the-new-ipho...

3) The Blackra1n download can be retrieved from a link at the bottom of the tutorial page

Thanks.

jeremy

Alok Saboo
Wonderful thanks!!

jeremytaylor
Thanks Disqus. About an hour ago I completely redid my jailbreak (using blackra1n) and now it works perfectly. No problems with prowl or any other app that uses push notification. I also read that gv mobile 2.0 is due out any day and will have push built in!

Thanks.

Jeremy

Alok Saboo
Great....so the problem seems to be with the software on the iPhone...

jeremytaylor
Yeah, originally I'd jailbroken with the pwnagetool (probably spelled
wrong). The blackra1n software seems to work much better.

J

Alok Saboo
Great...also which version of the firmware did you JB and can you provide a link to a guide (to JB) that you followed so that others can also benefit from it. Thanks!!

zachariah
I found this solution to produce MUCH cleaner (and customizable) notifications:
http://googlevoice.ub3rk1tten.com/voicegrowl/
Everything is the same, except you forward the sms emails to this service (which also provides a unique email address for you). and it, in turn sends it to prowl. Please consider adding it to your article if you like it.

Sam
Or u could use mail notifier (free in AppStore) and it will notify u instantly

Alok Saboo
Mail Notifier is a great solution, but from what I saw - it is not free. It costs $4.99. Secondly, it will push all the mails and not necessarily only the SMS. For people receiving lots of mails, this may not be an optimal solution.

RPS
This is cool, but it's possible to do it without Prowl. I setup GMail as a Microsoft Exchange account so it's a Push account. That way anytime I get an SMS forwarded to email, I get the email right away. No Prowl account needed

Alok Saboo
I agree..this is possible, but there are additional complications with that approach. I will try to post something related to that so that it can be made more manageable. Thanks for the heads up!!

daviddbe
i did everything you listed but i still cant get it to work.

Alok Saboo
Are you getting any errors? What step are you getting stuck? This is relatively straightforward and should work without any problems...

jeffhuynh
Hi Alok, I have followed all the steps you listed above. But alas, I have a problem: the notifications I'm receiving are blank and it shows M2P followed by the API key address and all that is in the body of the text is "Subj:" and it ends there. Can you help me out? I really want to have the actual SMS message show up in the push notification. Please help a brother out!

Much thanks to your work. :)

Alok Saboo
I will be more than happy to help you out with it. Are you seeing the SMSs in your mailbox? Can you tell me the exact filter that you created?

Joey
Hey looks like I'm having the same problem. This is odd though because on the first day of usage, everything worked okay. Then the next day, I started experiencing the symptoms described above--the notifications only contain:

M2P -- [xxxx]@mail2prowl.de Subj:

And nothing else. This is also what shows up in the Prowl app (so it's not a matter of the push notification itself cutting off the message). In my gmail, however, the full message is there.

To test, I tried just sending an email to the prowl address, but same results. I've also tried re-generating the API key, again with the same results. The only other thing I could think of was re-installing the app and power-cycling my phone, but still same problem. As I mentioned, the weird part is that it was working fine yesterday (the first day set it up), and I did not change anything. Any ideas?

Alok Saboo
Thanks for your comment. Let me try it again...will update soon.

Alok Saboo
Just tried it now...it worked for me. Wondering what is going wrong?

Joey
I searched the prowl forums and found this:
http://forums.cocoaforge.com/viewtopic.php?f=45...

Looks like it's something that occurs occasionally and just has to be reset. Mine is working now, a few hours later after it wasn't working all morning.

Alok Saboo
Thanks for the link!!!

Looks like there is some issue with the M2P service. Hopefully, they will work on it ASAP.

jeffhuynh
Thanks Alok. I have since then used GVMax, despite the security
uneasiness as I'd like to call it. It is not as constant and quick as
your email forwarding. I created the exact same filter you have
created, except I chose to mark off "mark as read", which shouldn't be
a big problem, as i'd prefer to be notified by just one application
and not in email as well.

Anyway, I have left GVMax and the gmail forwarding filter on, and
noticed that GVMax takes about 20 seconds more than 2.5 minutes at
times until I receive a prowl. The problem i'm gettig is that the M2P
prowl that I receive has no text in the message except for "subj:".
Something seems to be hanging up. Maybe the gmail server is sending me
the prowl even before the message loads? I believe that the prowl
server is not downloading the gmail message quick enough. What do you
think my problem is? Btw, some messages do make it through to my prowl
account. But the first couple prowls sent to me always seem to be
faulty.

Much thanks for the speedy response,

Jeff

Alok Saboo
I am not sure why should this be happening...lets do another thing to test the setup. Just send a test email to your Prowl id and see if that gets pushed properly to your phone. If that works, then we know that the problem is not with Prowl or the filter. Let me know the results..

j3g
This can be accomplished without prowl. All thanks to our friends at Google.

Step 1. Follow this guide to get PUSH for gmail, google calendar, and google contacts (Google setup an Exchange server because iphone does PUSH syncing best this way)
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer...

Step 2. Set Google Voice to forward to email.

DONE. you will now get SMS notification via email, when you reply to the SMS it will go straight back to the person too. or launch your GV App.

Name
Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for this. Really have been waiting for a good way to be able to do this. And this is really it. Great job. Thanks for sharing.

Easiest way to Enable Google Voice Push Notification on iPhone – Revised [Tutorials]

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