[Update: Live on Android, web] Google Voice adds ‘Anonymous Caller ID’ option

Google Voice last month began rolling out the Google Material Theme redesign to Android, and expanded VoIP availability. The latest feature for Google’s telephony service is a setting to continuously mask your caller ID when making calls.

Version 2019.07 of Google Voice for Android earlier this week contained strings for an “Anonymous Caller ID” feature that lets users “Hide your caller ID on outgoing calls.” This feature is now available on Android, but it first went live in the iOS client following the Material Theme update.

<string name=”anonymous_outbound_calls_title”>Anonymous Caller ID</string>

<string name=”anonymous_outbound_calls_summary”>Hide your caller ID on outgoing calls</string>

Users on Voice and other carriers have long been able to append *67 to the front of a number to block the caller ID from appearing. Instead of your Voice number, recipients would see either “Anonymous” or “Restricted” and be unable to call you back.

Of course, that trick only hid your number for the duration of that one call. The new option in Voice is permanent — until toggled off — and is a convenient time saver. This setting is already live on iOS, and will be applied across your other devices even if the preference does not yet show up on Android or the web.

Update 3/23: As we first spotted in mid-February on iOS, the “Anonymous caller ID” preference is now live (via AP) in Google Voice for Android and the web. In both clients, this option is available under the “Calls” section of settings. This ability to hide your Google Voice number on outgoing calls is synced across your account and therefore enabled/disabled on all apps.

Permanently blocking your caller ID is not by any means a new feature on other services, but is a welcome addition to Voice as Google keeps updating its consumer and enterprise telephony solution. Other traditional functionality that Voice recently rolled out to G Suite customers is support for calls to emergency service by manually associating an address.

Google plans to expand the G Suite edition to nine additional countries when it enters general availability in the coming months, but the consumer service will remain U.S. only.