Losing SMS from Hangouts is the bigger deal for me. I liked having one app on the home screen for voip and text and sms and videochat. It was simple and clean

Losing SMS from Hangouts is the bigger deal for me. I liked having one app on the home screen for voip and text and sms and videochat. It was simple and clean. Splitting it into 3 is a terrible user experience. I get the Unix philosophy of lots of small tools applying here, but the Unix has the shell to tie them together. If Google made their Contacts app work as a hub - every chat system logs their history for a given contact into their contacts app, so I can open up a contact and see every communication app (even multiplayer games) and an interlined history for them all? That would make this work. I could take the SMS, the chat, voice, even the dialer off the home screen and just have contacts - even a shortcut to my wife, so I could just open a person and then open a communication app for that person. That would work. But without that, having a zillion small communication apps does not provide a good experience because the android home screen is a bad shell for lots of small apps. It's just a launcher that's good for big monolithic ones.