I still use GV, but it's been frustrating. I stuck with the actual voice app as long as I could manage, but Google was making it <i>really</i> difficult to avoid using Hangouts. As in, there were features you wouldn't get if you didn't switch. Post-switch, MMS and group texts mostly work (although it still fails whenever someone tries to send me a phone contact). Prior to the switch, MMS showed up as emails and it was annoying. They worked really hard to make it inconvenient outside of Hangouts.<p>But, of course, the web and phone versions of hangouts have serious UX problems because it's a chat app first and a SMS/MMS app second. Instead of directly searching for people in the messaging, which will give me 2nd-degree contacts I've never spoken with instead of my actual google contacts with phone numbers, I search through the phone call interface and click the SMS button. On the phone, it tries its hardest to hide the SMS functionality behind Hangouts. And of course, Hangouts is less popular since they gutted that product. They need to stop their forced upgrade attempts. And incoming GV phone calls only show up in the Phone app's history, while outgoing only show in Hangouts. Not to mention how utterly difficult it is to search just GV SMS/voicemail history now. It's like they rounded up every stoned-useless intern they could and told them to break the product.<p>Also, I'd much rather they build their feature set around an API than around apps. They've already proven they have no idea on how to manage apps. I'd rather just have an API we can build against and use. Or even just treat GV as a SIP number that we connect to. I could build myself a pretty sweet SMS/VoiceXML gateway app for routing my calls. But depending on Google to not ruin things is kind of a lost cause at this point.<p>Free, carrier-agnostic web SMS should be an international thing, as long as it's not abused. And that ideal is probably one of the main reasons I stick with it.