Last week, Google announced Hangouts v2 which brought along a few cool features. But the one we were most interested in was the SMS integration. Now we’ve been waiting and waiting for it to start rolling out. It finally began rolling out on Thursday evening. So now it’s not just stuck with the Nexus 5, and those who installed the APK from the Nexus 5 factory image. SMS integration is great, but not everyone wants it. Good news though, you can turn it off. Now the way you turn it off, depends on the device.
Here’s how to turn off SMS integration on the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 running on KitKat:
- Open Hangouts
- Go into Settings
- Tap on SMS
- Under General tap on “SMS Enabled”
- That will take you into the system settings to change the SMS app
- Select the SMS app you want to use
On every other Android device its a bit different, since there is an actual stock messaging app on there.
- Open Hangouts
- Go into Settings
- Tap on SMS
- Under General check the box for “Turn on SMS”
That will turn on SMS integration for just about any Android device that is not a Nexus running Android 4.4 KitKat. It’s a bit strange that it is different per device, but then it’s kind of expected. Mainly because in KitKat there is no stock messaging app, and that Hangouts is now the stock messaging app. It’ll be interesting to see if the other OEMs go ahead and get rid of their own stock messaging app or not. Since I doubt it makes them much money like the rest of the bloat they install on their devices.
How many of you are loving the SMS integration in Hangouts now? Let us know in the coments down below.