Google Voice 0.2.8 for Android 1.5 on HTC Droid Eris

After having a BlackBerry for about three years and loving it for work email, calendar, contacts, etc, I recently decided to make a switch and picked up the HTC DROID Eris for Verizon.  I'm a big fan of most things Google, so I knew I would love this device.  I won't go into the details of why or give my own review, but I did want to touch on one thing that really frustrated me.

I have a Google Voice account, which I also love.  It no longer matters if I switch phones or don't get service.  I have one number, and I can set it up to ring anywhere.  Plain and simple.  The downside was not having my Google Voice number show up on peoples' caller ids.  Not a big deal, but irritating.  Enter the Google Voice app (available on many platforms).

When I first installed the app (version 0.2.7) it worked great.  I could make calls from my Eris and people would see my GV number instead of my Verizon number.  After an updated 0.2.8 was released, suddenly, I was receiving, "network busy" or "network unavailable" messages and I couldn't make any calls.

Sure I could browse to the GV webpage and initiate calls from there, have GV call me on my device, then connect the call, but what a huge pain.  After no responses from a Google rep on a thread in the GV help forum, someone figured out that the app was putting a + in front of the bridge number, which was causing the call to fail.

With no way to configure this and still no response, it seemed unlikely that I'd be able to use GV on my device any time soon.  Someone else finally mentioned that there is a way to remove the extra + in front of the number: clear the dialer app data.

Menu -> Settings -> Applications -> Dialer -> Clear Data

Simple as that.  Periodically, I find the app resorts to adding the + in front of the number, but clearing the dialer app data seems to fix it each time.  While this is only a workaround, and hopefully Google will fix this in a near-future release, I am able to use my Google Voice number again, and it works great!