I've used Google Talk ie Hangouts since the beginning with my friends/family. It's been a service that's worked reasonably well, for ages - and we can't have th

I've used Google Talk ie Hangouts since the beginning with my friends/family. It's been a service that's worked reasonably well, for ages - and we can't have that, can we? So now, on Android, they're trying to force us over to "Chat in Gmail". No, just no. I don't want to open my email to then hit a chat tab to message my brother. They must be separate apps; it's messy when they try to cram everything into one app, there's even Meet there now. (So there's a separate Google Chat app as well, but that's not mentioned at all in the Hangouts messaging, so I can only assume it's another dead project#. Functionality was awful and clunky when I tried it at some stage before). Whoever's come up with this has absolutely no idea how their products are being used in the real world. Looking for an alternative now that's not eg Facebook. Not sure about Discord, due to security. Not too keen on Signal due to ease of use, but might end up on that. ---- Edit: Signal is looking much nicer on the mobile than I recalled, sharing multiple pictures is really easy! This might be the go to. #Also checked again on "Google Chat", still buggy (tried sharing multiple pics, weird behaviour) - but at least it's got a dark background now, so appears to be in dev - even though they'd like us to Chat in Gmail..