re: Spinoff- Textra or Hangouts (with the new update)? What's your medicine?

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Why (seriously)? Is the idea that it'll mean less screw ups in texting?

And if so, isn't the biggest issue the OS difference and how they handle messaging, rather than 3rd party apps?

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I suppose my reason to bypass SMS specifically is outdated. I'm one of the few remaining people on the planet who doesn't have an unlimited texting plan. $5 a month for 200 texts. Sounds like a bad deal for those with unlimited texting, but I also have unlimited data and pay a good bit less than others do on the newer plans. The 200 text limit is rarely a problem, but recently my wife was brought into a group text with 10 people total. Any time she sent a single message in that group text, it counted against her 200-text limit 9 times. Luckily, they wanted to add someone else to the group and couldn't (apparently there's a 10-person limit in group SMS?), so my wife convinced them all to move to hangouts.

Mostly, I am in favor of a standardized, universal system of communicating with people without limitations (e.g., no character limit, no forced potato-quality video compression, true privacy features that are easily user-controlled and not carrier dependent). Plenty of apps exist for this, but they're competitive and not exactly interested in risking user base by opening up communication with each other.

Wired did an article about this a few days, comparing our fragmented messaging culture to China's WeChat, which is basically Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Hangouts/Skype, and PayPal all in one. Kind of like Google's services, except half a billion Chinese are using WeChat.