In this video, we’re going to be taking a look at the all new Google Messenger app, an app that many people would question its existence. But nonetheless, we’re going to dive into it and see what it’s all about.

So upon booting up the Messenger app, we’ll see that it takes you directly to your text messages or SMS messages. To put it simply, this app is just like any other stock OEM messenger apps that holds your text messaging conversations. That’s really it. Its main purpose is to make all the people who don’t like Hangouts to feel at home. And it was created specifically for the launch of the Nexus 6 and Android 5.0 Lollipop. With that said, this is Google Messenger. It’s plain and simple and of course, incorporates the all new material design.

So if we tap on the conversations, you can have an option to write a message down below along with attached file, a video, or a picture. You can actually take a live picture and send it straight from this app itself, which is pretty darn handy. Or you can select a picture from your gallery and in addition, you can add voice messages just by tapping and holding the microphone icon and it’ll automatically send. So that is certainly very useful.

In the upper right hand corner, you have the option to call the person you are messaging, which is always a nice option to have. Glad to see Google put it in there. The settings icon, next to that, allows you to go to people & options where you can basically choose to block or customize the notifications alert style of this person. You can also search, archive and delete various messages. And then there’s also some option to get some help & send some feedback so that Google can improve this app if something isn’t working right.

If we head back to the main page, we have the option to compose a new message and to select the person we want to contact either by looking through frequent contacts or all contacts. Or we can always dial the person’s number in the upper right hand corner or search for the person’s name using the keyboard, of course.

One thing that’s really important though, when using this app, is to make sure this app is defaulted as the main SMS app; which you can do in the settings. It might be currently defaulted for Hangouts or some other messaging app you might have. But if you want to start using this messenger app, you can definitely need to make Google Messenger the defaulted SMS app so definitely make sure you do that. But this is really the gist of what this app consists of. Obviously, not much here and that’s just because it’s meant to make the non-Hangout user feel much more at home and less confused. Really that is the only reason this app exists. Personally, I’m going to continue to use Hangouts as my main SMS app of choice. But if you don’t talk to people via Hangouts, then I could see why you just might want a standalone SMS messaging application.

But let me know if you plan on using this application for your SMS messages or if you’re still going to stick with Hangouts or maybe some other messaging application. Definitely let me know what your thoughts are by leaving me a comment down below or by tweeting me @BeauHD on Twitter.