Still using Hangouts? There might be some changes to the Android app soon as there are talks that the SMS and MMS feature will be removed. That is one of the biggest features in Hangouts for Android. Nothing is confirmed yet but just in case Google decides to make such changes..,sorry. We know Google’s efforts to improve the app but we’re not certain why the texting feature has to be removed.
Google regularly updates Hangouts. Just recently, Google Hangouts started to accept “Guests” for meetings, video calling was improved, it received its own webpage, and was finally updated to Material Design.
We don’t use the SMS/MMS functionality on Hangouts as often but it’s one feature that was most requested by Android users a couple of years back. Since then, it has received numerous updates and new features with SMS being integrated as well. Problem is, a number of users have been experiencing issues or are receiving late messages.
The most recent app update released last week included bug fixes and performance improvements. No mention of any changes on the SMS feature but just in case you’re a regular user of Hangouts, brace yourself. Google already has its own Messenger app and perhaps the company just wants us to use that instead. If and when this happens, we can also expect some changes for the Google Voice users.
The removal of SMS isn’t certain yet. It’s still a rumor but we already know that both Google Voice and Project Fi will remain. Let’s just wait and see.
VIA: PHANDROID
We should expect this to happen. In its quest for sales & profits, Facebook eliminated personal messaging from the mobile apps, replacing it with their “Messenger” (which, of course, requires giving them access to all of the info about our phone contacts as well. To communicate, we will be required to give up privacy, including who our contacts are. Google’s making the same move is inevitable.
Makes sense, now they can crawl your contacts list to suggest “friends.”
Wow, just as I succmbed to using this for my google voice texts this is going to get ripped away. I enjoyed the MMS feature tremendously. I guess its time to go back to the dark days of google voice app w/o MMS.
Shame… DINGDING…SHAME
i’m ok with this. I didn’t like the MMS and SMS features in hangout anyways.
At first it was great, but over the last few months, they’ve been slowly making it more of a pain to send sms/mms via hangouts. Instead, they made it easier for you to send an invite with a link to hangouts for the other person to install hangouts on their mobile device.
Hangouts is the only app I use for messaging, whether it’s hangouts people, sms or mms… I waited for this feature, they better not remove it!
When I saw this title, I thought to myself, how can they do that with Project Fi and Google Voice using hangouts as their messaging app. I then found another article saying that the functionality would still remain for Fi and Voice. This just doesn’t make sense. Why would Google support the current functionality for some users and eliminate it for others. That would just be more work (having to maintain two separate versions of the product) and I don’t see the payoff. Even if they split it into two different products with entirely different functionality, I don’t see what benefit will be gained by either half. Sort of like when they announced Fi and the elimination of VOIP support for voice when they were being built off the same platform. Having a home phone running off of VOIP that is synced with my Fi account is a great advantage over other carriers.
The regular messaging app (googles) works fine on fi. Its the one I almost always use. Just seems quicker.
Except when I sit down at my desk and someone sends me a text message and now I have to take my phone out of my pocket instead of seeing it on my computer. It’s bad enough that my office is Microsoft based and I still have to keep skype up and running!
I can see this happening as hangouts no longer supports sending emoji via sms, when just a few months ago it did. Now they make it easier for you to “Invite” the sms recipient to use Hangouts, which does support emoji. Although, that is not a feature I have to have, it was a “nice to have.” And some other changes for MMS and sending of photos have dropped support for sending a picture with accompanying text, you have to send a separate message for text with a picture/image. It seems they added sms/mms to get people to use hangouts, and now that their numbers are up, they’ll slowly phase it out, assuming that users will continue with Hangouts instead of sms/mms.