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Comment by joshwd | Hacker News Reader

Oh yay, more chat apps from Google. I had finally hit a nice point of integration: using Hangouts with Project Fi means I got somewhat close to the iMessage experience (at least as far as being able to send/receive SMS from my computer). Clearly the integration wasn't great, and the Hangouts app is badly in need of work, but it's a shame to see that even that limited functionality is going away in favor of more fragmentation.

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I saw the headline and honestly thought it was a satire piece.

This comes to mind: http://www.bonkersworld.net/confusement/

Can you elaborate on Hangouts + Project Fi? I'm also on Fi, and want the iMessage type experience, but always seem to fall short of it. Is there something particular about the Hangouts and Fi combo?

Set Hangouts as your default text message app on your phone, text messages and voicemail transcriptions then get sent to Hangouts and you can see them on the computer as well as the phone. You can also send text messages from the computer.

I never used iMessage so I don't know how it compares, but this has always worked well for me.

I'm not sure if the option is in the Fi app or the Hangouts app, but I allowed Hangouts to manage my SMS on the phone. It behaves as my Google Voice number did before: SMS (as hoped) and phone calls (not so useful in practice) pop up in Gmail as well as on the phone.

This is what I do, and it's reasonable. Annoyingly, I sometimes miss calls as my computer will start ringing 10+ seconds before my phone, so by the time I grab my phone, the incoming call has already been sent to voicemail.

I use PushBullet to send SMS from my computer. It get's the job done. https://www.pushbullet.com/

Join[1] is a nice alternative to PushBullet. Does most of what PushBullet does [including sending SMS from your computer] but costs a one-time fee of £4,99, instead of PushBullet's monthly subscription.

[1] https://joaoapps.com/join/

I wouldn't trust a one time fee app to be properly maintained though.

Awesome! I'm glad you said something because that looks great.

i think airdroid is free or one time as well.

https://www.airdroid.com/

The new Google Voice app is a relatively good experience, unified across web/mobile platforms.

Except somehow they managed to completely hide the "make a phone call" button on the web - which is pretty much the most important use case. So, first thing I do is go to the "legacy Google Voice" menu item; it re-loads the page and there's my old friend...

You can't make a phone call from the app either afaict. You still use Hangouts Dialer.

Except Google Fi, where you can't use Google Voice. FFS Google.

Is there a way to route hangout messages to Google Voice?

Does it work well with project fi accounts?

You cannot use it with Fi at all

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