There was a time last year when Apple eased its policy on Google Voice applications for the iPhone, and many users were waiting for the official Google Voice app to come back to the platform. But before the official client, a popular third-party one came around and quickly became many users’ favorite way to access the VoIP service from iOS: GV Mobile. The app, an unofficial client, was installed by thousands of people but eventually fell down in the charts due to the release of the official GV application by Google, which was also updated multiple times in the past months to work on the iPad and iPod touch. GV Mobile, on the other hand, was never updated. People even forgot about it.

GV Mobile is coming back today with a huge update that will surely convince many loyal Google Voice users to give it a try once again. Version 2.0 is a complete redesign with a plethora of new features, optimizations and bug fixes. It’s still sold at $2.99 in the App Store.

The new GV Mobile has a new beautiful user interface with dark menus and popups, it’s got push notifications (finally) and picture messaging. You can now text to multiple recipients (up to 5), search and browse all your GV folders you’ve created in the webapp. There’s a lot of other stuff in this update, such as the comeback of spell check and favorites, support for GV actions (read/unread,star/unstar,spam,block,archive/unarchive) and more call methods. Everything’s been revamped, redesigned and refined for this update.

You can find GV Mobile for iPhone here. If you’re serious about Google Voice, you should try it even if you like the official app.