With Fi, you can still use hangouts for normal SMS, which they removed for non-Fi users last year (around the same time they removed merged conversations). Rig

With Fi, you can still use hangouts for normal SMS, which they removed for non-Fi users last year (around the same time they removed merged conversations). Right now, all my SMS/MMS go through hangouts, and then down to whatever devices I want, which is great since I can use hangouts on my work phone, from the computer, etc, and all my texts still come and go from the same phone number.