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Once upon a time, people couldn’t get the internet on their cellphones and text messages were the only way to communicate if you didn’t want to, you know, pick up your phone and make a voice call. These days there are dozens of instant messaging apps that serve the same purpose for many people… but SMS and MMS messages are still handy if you want to send a message to someone who doesn’t have a smartphone or who doesn’t use the same chat services as you.

But that doesn’t mean you want to have to fire up a different app for SMS than you do for an internet chat.

Soon you may not have to. Google is reportedly bringing support for text messaging into the Google Hangouts app. You’ll reportedly be able to use it to send messages to any contact, whether they use Hangouts or not — and you’ll be able to keep track of which friends are engaging in an SMS conversation thanks to a “via SMS” message in the time stamp.

Google Hangouts with SMS

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