Somewhere around two years ago, I switched entirely to Google Voice as my primary phone number. I was given an Android device for work and rather than carry two phones, I used my Google Voice number for personal stuff and gave up my individual Verizon account. I set the Android to use Google for default outbound calls and text, but was still able to switch back to the phone’s native number when required. When I left my old job and had to get a new personal phone, I went with Sprint because of their direct service integration. I was committed.

I loved a lot of things about Google Voice. The fact that I could have two numbers on one phone was attractive. The voicemail system was awesome. More than anything, though, the ability to text from a browser was so incredibly useful and convenient that it, by itself, was the biggest reason I stuck with it for so long. I loved being able to refer back to old messages easily, wipe my phone without losing anything of value, communicate with people even when the phone was dead or pulling it out of my pocket was inappropriate.

But then there were two issues. First, I was never comfortable with the lack of support and accountability for the service within Google. Sometime well over a year ago, there was a partial outage of the system that only affected Verizon subscribers. We were unable to receive inbound calls for something like two days, during which time I missed an extremely important call from a doctor. Their outage had an impact on my health and there was nobody for me to call to get a status update, no explanation from Google anywhere.

You see, when Google Voice breaks, your only support option is to post on their message board. That’s it. From what I remember, they didn’t actually acknowledge or explain the problem but a day or two later, they said that it should be fixed soon. Slowly, quietly, people started finding service restored. Life went on.

The other issue was the lack of MMS support. If someone sends a Google Voice user an MMS, they will not receive it and the sender will not get any notification of this. The message simply disappears into the ether. In October of 2011, they made a post on their blog about rolling out MMS support and some people have reported a change in the service’s behavior: certain people find that some senders — from what I remember, it’s someone using Sprint being sent a message from someone else on Sprint — messages will now go to their email instead of disappearing. This is all well and good but without predictable, consistent behavior, it’s pretty worthless.

Ultimately, the MMS issue and what it represented to me was the last straw. One night, very late, I received a text of, “You want this?” from a girl who had been sending flirty messages for a few days. My immediate reaction was the thought that she was drunk and propositioning me in an exceptionally awkward manner. Common sense prevailed and I assumed she was talking about a distortion pedal she found, since I knew she was cleaning that day, so I confirmed that I missed a picture. This wasn’t a big deal but what about the messages sent that didn’t have follow-up texts? Were there people out there who took the time to share things and just thought or think I’m a serious dick?

The lack of MMS support represented Google’s lack of commitment to the service. I don’t think that a phone has been made in ten years without the ability to send and receive picture messages. If you search Google for the phrase “Google Voice MMS,” you will get 2.35 million hits. If we can’t count on Google to provide this feature, something that’s so standard that you wouldn’t even bother to check if a carrier or device supported it, what can we count on Google to do?

I ported my number over last week, when I bailed on my Android and switched to the iPhone 5. (After four Android devices, I was tired of inconsistent performance there, too, but that’s another story.) My heart aches with longing for the ability to text from the web. I have sent maybe two pictures and received two that I can remember. I keep hoping that I’m going to read something about a magic solution for this so I can move my number back and use the service again. Until then, though, it looks like I’m stuck sending messages and checking voicemail from my phone. Somehow, life is still worth living.