Make macOS tel: links open in Google Voice

All I wanted was to be able to click on a phone number and have it do something useful. One bald yak later, here we are. A phone number link is just a URL. It often looks something like tel:+18005550111. It would be nice to click on that and have it do something useful. Click in Google Maps, click in your terminal, whatever.

On macOS, clicking that link does not necessarily mean your browser gets to decide what happens. The operating system gets the first vote. And my macOS system is sure eager to send it to FaceTime. Which I don’t use and is a dead-end on my system.

Here’s how it works. LaunchServices looks for the application registered as the handler for the tel: URL scheme, and it sends the URL there. Meaning if FaceTime is the current default handler, then clicking a phone number in Google Maps, in Chrome, can still end up in FaceTime. No amount of poking through Chrome preferences will fix it. You can see if you try the more general:

open 'tel:+18005550111'

Boom. FaceTime. From macOS.

I wanted all the tel: links that the system knows how to dispatch to open my Google Voice account instead. From the browser, from a terminal, from a document, from whatever you can think of.

That’s the reason for the little helper app:

google-voice-tel-handler

What the helper does

This is an AppleScript applet with an on open location handler. The OS can send URL events to an applet, so the script receives the original tel: URL, extracts the phone number, and opens the corresponding Google Voice call URL in the default browser.

The script accepts the common shapes I’ve seen:

tel:+18005550111
tel://+18005550111
tel:800-555-0111

It strips the tel: wrapper, keeps the digits, and opens a Google Voice URL using the /u/0 account slot:

https://voice.google.com/u/0/calls?a=nc,%2B18005550111

Your default browser takes it from there.

How it works

You can see all the source code. It’s not much, and the AppleScript itself is pretty readable.

There’s a build script that compiles the applet with osacompile, then patches the generated Info.plist so the bundle has a stable identity and declares the URL scheme:

CFBundleIdentifier = com.jasonhemann.google-voice-tel-handler
CFBundleURLTypes   = tel

The tools involved are already on macOS: osacompile, PlistBuddy, and codesign.