FCC submission claims iPhone telephony app was rejected, but Apple maintains it's still in the approval process.
Apple may be in hot water with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), after Google published an uncensored version of its evidence to the ongoing FCC investigation into its Google Voice iPhone app.
Google's submission explicitly states that "Apple's representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone."
It goes on to claim that Apple SVP of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller informed Google's SVP of engineering and research Alan Eustace "that Apple was rejecting the Google Voice application" during a phone call on 7th July this year.
The document had earlier been published with these 'confidential' sections blocked out, but Google abandoned its request for confidentiality "in light of Apple's decision to make its own letter fully public and in the interest of transparency".
Google's submission flatly contradicts Apple's submission, which in mid-August claimed that "Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it."
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After Google released its unredacted letter on Friday, Apple again disagreed in a new statement: "We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google."
It goes without saying that this is high-stakes stuff: there is minimal wiggle room to escape the conclusion that one of the companies must be lying - and to a government investigation to boot.
While a telephony app like Google Voice usually falls outside Mobile Entertainment's core focus, this disagreement could have major implications for the industry.
Not just in terms of Apple's app submissions process, but also the far meatier questions of control and access that are swinging between handset makers like Apple, web firms like Google and the mobile operators.
