Third-party messaging apps now have access to Google Voice; CyanogenMod to include ‘Babel’ soon
Likely best known for his work on all things ClockworkMod, Android developer Koush has been working for the past few weeks on a tool he currently calls “Babel” to integrate Google Voice into third-party messaging apps. Following a development cycle with some ups and downs, he has decided to completely open-source the project for anyone to use and implement. Babel (although this is only a temporary name) works alongside code in the latest nightly builds of CyanogenMod to seamlessly integrate your Google Voice messages into the stock Messaging app.
Nothing is perfect just yet, but the latest versions of the Babel apk along with the latest nightly builds of CM give users a relatively seamless integration option for the stock messaging app after a little bit of hackery to get things set up just right. In his latest post on Google+, he notes that it is going through review to be included in CM completely as well, which should cut down on the hassle for users to get things working.
The hope is that going forward more messaging apps will take advantage of this code to integrate Google Voice using Babel (or whatever it is called going forward) as the back-end. Enterprising developers among us can take a look at everything available on GitHub at the source link below.
Source: +Koushik Dutta (Google+); GitHub