I don't know about lost or stolen, but I had a screen failure earlier this year. It was a known fault for my model of phone, so they did an out-of-warranty repair on it... which "should be a week or so", including the FedEx time. It actually took about a month.

GoogleVoice kept me going for 99% of my needs. I wasn't able to talk to my tenants, and I could only text from my desktop-- so when people out in the field needed a box of screws or something, I found out about it after I'd driven the 45 minutes back home from the box stores! ---but it kept me going.

My phone was gone for about a month. About three weeks into it, I finally broke down and ordered a used phone from Swappa. It arrived, but it was locked-- even though it was physically an unlocked phone, the former owned had used it on TMobile, and my carrier was AT&T, and I needed to get the former owner to tell TMobile to release it, so I could use it with my carrier. That was a few hours of running back and forth to the library (for email to the seller), AT&T, Best Buy, and the TMobile store! :P

And when I got home--- my old phone arrived within the hour.

I don't do this, but I think a lot of people here might suggest that you use something like Google Voice as your main number -- that would be the number that you give out publicly to people to call you. You set that up to forward to your cell phone number.

That way, if your cell died or was temporarily unavailable, you could simply tell Google to forward your public Google Voice number somewhere else -- either to voicemail or another phone number or wherever you wanted.

Just a thought.

- John...

As John said, if you give out Google Voice to all your tenants and contractors and your cell phone dies, all you have to do is "roll it over" to another cheapie Trak phone (Wal-Mart, $19.99!), or to your spouse's/kid's phone, or your home line if you still have one. then once your phone is fixed/replaced, just roll it back. Seamless as far as your tenants/contractors are concerned.

I'm another GV Fan.

I switched my cell service to T-Mobile last year. They have their "Digits" service that is very similar to GV.

I can use my GV number to make calls using Google Hangouts as well. I've used it all over the world.

I use Android rather that iOS, and all my contacts are in my Google account. That way, when I need to reach someone, their contact is available from any device. If I get a new phone, my contacts are all there as well.

I believe you can do this with iOS as well, I just don't know the steps.

I use GV with a adapter called ObiHai the obi200.

It adapts a land line phone to the internet to use GV without the necessity of a cell phone.

GV allows you to ring multiple phones. If your cell phone is missing you can shut it off so others aren't getting your calls.

I keep the ringer off on the desk phone generally. Of course I have all calls going to voicemail on GV.

moby: Make sure you stay on top of that situation. Remember that it could vanish at any time and is "unsupported" by Google. They almost killed that a while back, but decided to leave it with their Google Hangouts service -- but they appear to be shutting that done soon too. They recently said that they plan to shut down Google Hangouts (which would take the ObiHai functionality with it) in 2020. That's only a year from now. Make sure you plan ahead...

- John...

John, in reading the Obihai forum there doesn't seem any concerns at the present.

GV, as with all free services you have to go with the flow.