Ok textra was good but yesterday they started putting ads on my texts which is weird. So downloaded a new one and that has a permanent casino link at the top of the text summary’s asking me to install a Casino app 😐

Any recommendations?

I just use the stock Hangouts app. Does what I need it to do – send texts.

yep hangouts, it sends and receives texts really quite well. What else were you looking for?

I find the standard Lollipop ‘Messenger’ text app fine. Hangouts had a tendancy to not receive texts occassionaly for some reason on my Nexus 5.

I used to use GoSMS back in the day when the stock app was crap. Not tried it in years now but may be worth a look?

‘Messenger’ is the Facebook messaging app isn’t it?

You can send SMS through Hangouts? What witchcraft is this? *goes to check*

Nah, I think we’re at cross purposes. You can send “texts” in so far as you can IM someone else who also has Hangouts installed. Attempting to message a phone number results in it composing a Hangouts invite and farming out to your regular SMS app.

Probably need confirmation from the OP as to what he means exactly by “texts”.

Hangouts had a tendancy to not receive texts occassionaly for some reason on my Nexus 5.

Ditto

Gosms is the one (currently) with a casino banner at the top.

Nah, I think we’re at cross purposes. You can send “texts” in so far as you can IM someone else who also has Hangouts installed. Attempting to message a phone number results in it composing a Hangouts invite and farming out to your regular SMS app.

I send SMS texts, as in normal texts, to whomever I might want to send a text to, by Hangouts. I have no other text app installed.

hangouts can slurp sms as well – check the settings.

First use it tries to do this..

google also do an SMS app called ‘messenger’ i use that and it’s better than any other SMS app i’ve used including hangouts

been with GoSMS Pro since the stock SMS on the Nexus4 was rubbish, particularly the group sms options, cant remember if it struggled with groups, or translated it into MMS.

might investigate lollipops offering if people think its improved

hangouts can slurp sms as well – check the settings.

Oh yeah, so it does. Gosh, live and learn.

google also do an SMS app called ‘messenger’

Well, you learn something every day.

oh yeah, I’ve out-Cougared Cougar 8)

I’ve been usign Textra too, shame it’s going to ads, will need to see what the pro version costs.

The problem with Hangouts is if you send an SMS message to more than one person it will send it as MMS rather than SMS so you get charged for it as they aren’t part of the bundle. Textra allows you to change this setting so you don’t have to pay for MMS.

EDIT: Aha! I see google’s Messenger allows this setting to be changed, looks like I’ll be switching to that.

Cool. Just installed Google Messenger. It never occurred to me I could use anything other than the stock app. The stock app even can be disabled.

I find texting a bit of a problem with Android at the moment.
Hangouts is a bit of a pain to use, but once you get used to it there are so many issues. MMS keep not working, it crashes regularly under lollipop.
I used ChompSMS for a while but that then wanted money to stop ads, so stopped.

I’m just trying Messenger, but that’s reported to have problems receiving MMS messages when you are on a call. We shall see how that goes…

Everything seems to crash under lollipop. The only time is doesn’t crash if the phones running in safe mode.

I use the standard messaging app. Seems to work okay.

Still disappointed with Android in some ways since moving over from iOS.

Not being able to customise the notification tone for various apps is annoying. As is the keyboard layout, iOS does that much better.

As is the keyboard layout, iOS does that much better.

You know you can add any keyboard you want?

Not being able to customise the notification tone for various apps is annoying. As is the keyboard layout, iOS does that much better.

You can change both. Standard Andriod is a bit geeky and is geared to someone who knows what they’re doing. The skins written on top by the big manufactures are supposed to address this geeky side and make it more user friendly, in theory.

Everything seems to crash under lollipop.

I certainly needs rebooting regularly, which is a shame as Kitkat was dead stable. So far 5.1 seems a lot better, though I’ve only been using it for a week. The OTA update I attempted when it first came out bricked my phone!! Google support was brilliant though and sorted it.

somouk – Member

Not being able to customise the notification tone for various apps is annoying.

Install an app named ‘lightflow’, you can change the tone for any supported notification and also what colour the LED flashes (if your phone can do that). I have purple for SMS/Whatsapp, orange for tapatalk etc.