Out of curiosity, why didn't you keep using it, but with Hangouts instead?
At the time that I switched, the Hangouts app was having some difficulties of its own. The biggest issue I had with it is that Hangouts would try to upgrade me from an SMS chat to a Hangouts chat with someone, when the recipient was an infrequent or Gmail-only Hangouts user. Google would recognize their number and send Hangouts messages, they wouldn't see the messages on their iOS device because they didn't have a Hangouts app, so to them it would seem like I had stopped responding.
Not saying it's hard or complicated, just hard and complicated enough for me to avoid. When I send someone a message there should be no guesswork involved. Not sure how both google and apple could mess this stuff up so badly in their attempts to make it "just work." Or how much of the issue is the "use only our ecosystem or your shit may to break" mentality.
:grumble grumble:
Now, back when I used Android I remember Hangouts ruining everything it touched and I had to switch back to the deprecated Messages app (which was completely fine and did not need replacing) to fix it. Maybe the problem with the Android users on these group texts isn't on the iMessage side....
I also haven't figured out how to set it to have Hangouts ring when I am on wifi and forward to the phone only when I'm not. So I get dueling ringers.
There was some other limitation for a while that kept me from moving. Group messages, or voicemail maybe? They did eventually fix it though, so I can't remember.