If you heard our podcast last week about Google Voice, you know that it’s a service that lets you create a personal phone number that is yours to keep. It doesn’t matter if you change phone carriers or move across the country — your phone number remains your own. You can use the service to program in the phone numbers for the physical devices you depend upon — your cell phone, work phone and home phone — and use your Google Voice number to route calls to you. You can choose to have all your phones ring whenever someone calls the Google Voice number or tweak it so that each phone will only ring during specific times of the day or only for certain people. It’s a cool product.

Not long ago, Google began creating applications for smartphones like the Blackberry and Android phones that lets you dial out using your Google Voice number. Google Voice works for incoming calls but not outgoing calls (unless you’re logged into your Google Voice Web page — then you can select an option that will cause Google Voice to act like an operator and call your phone and then call the person you want to talk to). But the Google Voice apps allow you to make an outgoing call and will display your Google Voice number to whomever you contact. That way your contact doesn’t get confused with multiple numbers.

According to a report by Claudine Beaumont of The Telegraph, Apple has decided that the Google Voice apps replicate iPhone features. That’s one of the criteria Apple uses to decide if an application is acceptable — anything that duplicates an iPhone feature is right out.