FWIW I've found that it worked for me just fine as well. Used it up until a few months ago when I transitioned to a Nexus 5. Hangouts is pretty good too, alth

FWIW I've found that it worked for me just fine as well. Used it up until a few months ago when I transitioned to a Nexus 5. Hangouts is pretty good too, although a few nitpicks - the emoji icons are ugly as sin (I'm willing to bet that some sort of copyright/patent law is to blame here), and it's gotten a few messages stuck (to be fair I can't say the same thing hasn't happened to iMessage). Strangely, both Hangouts and iMessage are better than plain SMS though, even with just sending plain text messages back and forth.