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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Google Fi will continue to work with Hangouts?

The whole Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Fi, Messages app is all a mess to me. As someone with various activity in all of these services I just have no idea what is happening. I wish there was a diagram explaining how everything breaks down alongside Google account / identity. There is some issue with RCS compatibility and using Messages for Google Fi. I just want the future to be here and tell me what I can/can't use and how.

No. The article links to this page[0], which has a section on Fi integration. The guidance is to move to Messages which will support SMS and dialing through the Messages app, including web app usage when the phone is off.

[0]: https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangout...

What's awesome is, I did the migration, and now both hangouts and messages get my text messages, even though the "SMS" thingy under Hangouts is disabled. Thankfully most of my friends use Signal as well, so it's mostly 2FA codes that pop up twice.

The problem is this disables RCS is my understanding. So things are still bifurcated.

I can only speak for myself. I have Google Fi service. One of the big selling points for me is the dead simple billing. Another huge selling point is trivial unification of calling and messaging across devices.

The latter feature has been enabled by Hangouts up until now. Now, it seems to be equally fulfilled by Messages. I'm not losing other Messages features, as I've never used them. I'll get to keep my unified calling and messaging across devices. I am relatively happy. I'd prefer no change, but it's been clear that Hangouts would go away for some time now.

But there’s no Messages app for iOS?

iOS seems to have a fully functioning HTML5 browser. (:

There's also no iMessage on Android.

Also, Fi support for iPhones is listed as beta, and I don't think there's ever been full support for iPhones on Fi.

Finally, if Apple were to launch a Fi-like offering, I don't think anyone would expect even marginal support for Android devices. This is not to say that you couldn't get service working on Android, just that there would be literally 0 support from Apple for such a use case.

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