Messenger is the text app for Android
Hangouts is the evolution of gChat, which has been out since before iMessage, and does the same thing as messenger along with gChat
Apple fanboys once again puzzled when they step out of the cave
how do people still not get it? 
This ain't about anti-choice. No one is complaining about the multitude of 3rd party options one has for texting and messaging. This is about the inefficiencies of Google developing separate apps.
In addition to the numerous points already raised in this thread, the other disadvantage to developing two separate apps with similar functions is that innovations/improvements made in one don't carry over to the other. For example, messenger has a nice feature of automatically assigning different color bubbles to each member of a group chat. This makes reading group messages much better....but hangouts doesn't do this
I tried using hangouts as my default app, it just fails tho, on a number of fronts. First, with gifs, I can't send any media (gifs, pics, vidz) with a caption....the text has to be sent separately. Secondly if a gif is too large, it'll just send a still of one frame. No warning, you won't know it did this until the message is sent, and the recipient is left confused. Messenger has neither of these problems. Secondly, the conversation list won't lost all my convos. I don't know if it's just listing those with hangouts or what but it's annoying. 3rd, when I want message someone, I just want to send them a message...don't want to have to decide everytime wether it's an sms, mms, group, or whatever. If all I'm saying is "what's up?" Hangouts should be able to determine an sms is the proper route, or maybe a hangout is because the recipient uses hangouts...But do all that behind the scenes. A single convo may go from texts to gifs back to texts to a vid, who the hell wants to open a separate app depending on what they wanna send in the same conversation?
Basically. It boils down to seamless integration within the app itself and the entire Apple ecosystem. "It just works."
This ain't about anti-choice. No one is complaining about the multitude of 3rd party options one has for texting and messaging. This is about the inefficiencies of Google developing separate apps.
In addition to the numerous points already raised in this thread, the other disadvantage to developing two separate apps with similar functions is that innovations/improvements made in one don't carry over to the other. For example, messenger has a nice feature of automatically assigning different color bubbles to each member of a group chat. This makes reading group messages much better....but hangouts doesn't do this
I tried using hangouts as my default app, it just fails tho, on a number of fronts. First, with gifs, I can't send any media (gifs, pics, vidz) with a caption....the text has to be sent separately. Secondly if a gif is too large, it'll just send a still of one frame. No warning, you won't know it did this until the message is sent, and the recipient is left confused. Messenger has neither of these problems. Secondly, the conversation list won't lost all my convos. I don't know if it's just listing those with hangouts or what but it's annoying. 3rd, when I want message someone, I just want to send them a message...don't want to have to decide everytime wether it's an sms, mms, group, or whatever. If all I'm saying is "what's up?" Hangouts should be able to determine an sms is the proper route, or maybe a hangout is because the recipient uses hangouts...But do all that behind the scenes. A single convo may go from texts to gifs back to texts to a vid, who the hell wants to open a separate app depending on what they wanna send in the same conversation?
Me neither, that's why it went with messenger in hopes that I'd see some performance increase.
The stick messenger is shyt for sending video and that's what I use.
It was for me (nexus 6p).
Not for iPhone users
Both were installed (hangouts and messenger).
