There used to be a message on my phone that hangouts was deprecated in favor of messages for SMS. This message would pop up ever week or so after I acknowledged

There used to be a message on my phone that hangouts was deprecated in favor of messages for SMS. This message would pop up ever week or so after I acknowledged it. Fast forward a couple weeks, I decide to delete hangouts and soley use "messages." Phone service stops working. I call google fi. Apparently Google Fi depends on the hangouts app to be installed. I complained that I wanted to use hangouts again because it grouped hangouts and SMS, reinstalled hangouts, and everything starts working again. The message about deprecating hangouts has NEVER showed up again, and I get to use my phone as I wanted to in the first place. Hopefully my little piece of happiness in hangouts doens't get bombed on soon by some eager project manager