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

What would be next? Every single restaurant be a Taco Bell?

I would love to use Hangouts and Messenger but MMS doesn't always come through unlike Textra which never fails. My one complaint about Textra is when I swipe away notifications from the notification bar, it marks them as read. I'd rather it not do that as I'm just trying to keep my notification bar clear

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what is messenger?

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Google's standalone SMS app. It's like a prettier Hangouts without all of the functionality

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i've never had a MMS not come through with hangouts. can you describe this?

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sometimes when an MMS comes in, it would have the "click to download" or whatever it says. On Textra, it would already be there

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I hope it is gone in a year. I hope the entire 3rd-party texting market collapses and everyone has to use hangouts. I am 100% in favor of a universal texting app that bypasses the carriers, but the quantity of those texting apps out there is actually preventing the "universal" concept.

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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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Well, the problem is we have a situation right now where texting and messaging are being used as interchangeable terms, and people don't understand the difference.

Text messages (actual SMS messages) are basically a standard, so any phone can text any number and the text will go through. They are universal, that's the pro. The con is it is severely lacking in features (no read notification, group messages are hacked together and work like shite, etc.).

Messaging ("chat" style apps like iMessage, Hangouts, and hundreds of other platforms) use central servers that provide group messaging features, read "receipts", and all that shite, but the con here is there is no standard. This means it's a pain in the arse to chat with all of your people if some use iMessage (impossible for Android users), some use Hangouts, etc. Now you have to remember which app to use for which contact, which is obviously not ideal.

So right now we have a billion iPhone users who think they are texting when they're really using a proprietary messaging service, and a Hangouts app that makes it more clear when it is texting vs messaging via Hangouts, a metric frickton of text-only apps, and a metric frickton of competing messaging service apps, and it's a huge fricking mess.

So we need an open, universal standard to replace old-school text messaging if we want to get out of this mess. Ideally, the service would combine text, voice, and video, and would be open for anyone to create an app to utilize the service. The problem is, who can we trust to run such a service? Or is it possible to create a decentralized peer-to-peer service that is secure enough?

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swipe up on the notification rather than left or right. It'll keep it as unread

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That's a pretty cool trick but it still keeps the icon in the notification tray which is what I was referring to

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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.

I still don't have that Hangouts update you all are talking about. I'm still on 3.3.

Sorry about that. Misread your post

Mine defaults to the last thing I used in the conversation. The only thing I can think of is if you send an SMS and the person sends back in Hangouts, it would change it.

Do you have the merge hangouts and sms messages box checked?