I opened my friend’s account in Firefox with Firebug extension and start looking into what happens when a user removes forwarding phone number. So let’s fix it and find a way to completely remove forwarding number. Furthermore, it is crashed with error when running on a fresh Google Voice account. However, as it turned out later, disabling phone number is not sufficient to solve the problem.

You can download sources here: phoneDisable.zip. It works well with mine friend’s account, it really disables forwarding phone.

I started writing an app using google-voice-java framework. I decided to try phoneDisable call first. I need to make web service API call to remove forwarding number.

google-voice-java authenticated OK, has a broad range of API calls and even has phoneDisable call.

It seems it has a broken API implementation.

pygooglevoice can’t authenticate with web service.

Google Voice PHP API authenticated OK with web service, but its functions are limited to few basic calls and don’t have function to remove forwarding number.

I started googling this API and found three interesting products: google-voice-java, Google Voice PHP API and pygooglevoice. Then I remembered about the iPhone’s client app which surely use some API to communicate with Google Voice web service. However, my problem was getting more and more harden. Later, in private conversation, Google Security Team accepted there isn’t a significant security impact here. I don’t think it is a real vulnerability, so let it stay there. It seems it is a bug in Google subsystem, which breaks architectural ideas of the program system. I looked in page’s JS and the forwarding number is still there. The number was assigned successfully. I asked my friend to assign this number to his account.

Then it will disappears from original account.

Add the same forwarding number to another account and verify it.

I’ve found a workaround somewhere on the web: I tried to modify some internal JS code to cheat the system, but it did not work. I opened Safari’s Web Inspector and started looking into JavaScript code, page resources, etc. I started thinking how to remove forwarding number from my fresh account. I set up their account in Telephone.app and, well, it works really well.īut I am still interesting in getting Google Voice phone number too. By the way, its sound quality seems even better than Google Voice, and they use production-grade SIP protocol instead of Google’s proprietary one. I registered alternative phone number at Callcentric Internet Phone Service, they give me SIP phone number. In fact, the account became completely unusable. Unfortunately, Google Voice interface don’t have an option to remove this number. I decided to replace forwarding phone number which I entered in step 2 to another one. I’ll tell that this problem is not limited to mobile numbers only. I started googling again and found nothing new related to my situation. OK, this topic is about “mobile phone number”, and that’s not my case. If you’re receiving an error message when trying to select a GV number, please note that you are most likely encountering an issue because you have used your mobile phone number as a forwarding phone on another Google Voice account in the last year. If you have, you will not be able to sign up for a new Google Voice number with the mobile number you’re trying to use. Please use a different phone number. It is a very short post, so I cite it here: I read a pinned topic called “ Number selection error”. The best place to start the search is official Google Voice product forum. I tried again and again after some time and nothing changed.

I got “There was an error with your request.

I chose a good Google Voice number and clicked “Continue”.I entered my forwarding number and verified it.I clicked “Get a Voice number” link, then “I want a new number” button.I registered Google Voice account and tried to get a phone number. I suggest to use CallCentric SIP VoIP service instead. New investigations were not conducted. Since August 2015 this solution does not work anymore, because Google have changed configuration of their servers.

Google voice login problems