You can sign out of your account to only send text messages, but the app is better suited for people who want to send both SMS and instant messages. The only downside is that the app often automatically signs you into your Google account when you open the app, which will show you as "online" to people using Hangouts on the Web. Hangouts also supports group messaging, video chats, and voice calls, and you can send your location to your friends in a conversation. It's a great choice if you already use Hangouts on the Web. Not to be ignored, Google's video and instant messaging app can also handle your text messages too, and you can switch between chatting over your data connection and sending an SMS message within a thread. What's not: You can unlock extra themes and customization options, but for a fee.įree, installed on most devices by default What's great: The app's design is clean, but you still get tons of features to customize your experience. There's also a pop-up reply window so you can respond to messages anywhere in your phone.ĮvolveSMS also supports group messaging, iOS emoji, and you can block phone numbers from sending you messages.
Like Textra, you can customize the design of the app, but EvolveSMS, you can also use themes to make sweeping changes, but it'll cost you to unlock that feature, and you'll need to download another app from the same developer called Theme Spotlight. What's different, and great, about the app is that you can swipe on the screen to switch conversations. Like Hello, EvolveSMS has a streamlined design and organizes your conversations into tabs. What's not: The app's overall design is a bit dated. What's great: Textra gives you a lot of freedom to customize the app, from the look and feel, to notifications. If you don't like the quick reply widget, you can turn it off in settings. You can also pick the colors for the chat bubbles in your conversations, and there are app three themes white, dark, and black.Īnother great feature is the Textra has a pop-up widget that appears with every new text, and you can reply from any screen. That means you can tell, at a glance, the difference between a text from mom and your best friend. For each of your contacts, or just a few, you get to pick the notification icon color and alert tone that plays when you get a new message. Textra is great if you like a lot of customization options in your apps. What's not: When you send a photo, you can't send text along with it. What's great: The app's tidy design doesn't get in the way.
You can also send free text messages to your friends who also use Hello, a feature that's still in beta. Other features include actionable notifications that allow you to reply or mark a message as read without opening the app.
The only downside of this feature is that the camera viewfinder in the app is just a tiny circle next to the text field, and it's hard to see what you're recording. You can send photos with Hello, and the app recently added a GIF feature, where you can record a short GIF with your camera and send it to one or more of your contacts. There's also an optional night mode that turns on automatically when the sun goes down.
The app has a clean design, with a white background and little clutter. One of my favorite apps, Hello is a minimalist SMS app that creates tabs for each of your conversations so you can easily switch between them. Just a note that this list focuses on SMS apps only, not social messaging apps such as WhatsApp or GroupMe. If you don't see your favorite, leave a comment below to share what it is and why you like it. I've rounded up four apps that offer a little something extra that most of the stock SMS apps. Some can send GIFs, others are skilled at group messages, and most can help you personalize your notifications. Luckily, Google Play is ripe with text messaging apps with modern designs, fun features, and customization options.
The SMS app that comes with your Android phone will serve you just fine to send text and photo messages to your contacts, but many can't do much more than that.