Do android users actually uses Hangouts? I have a couple of friends on it but my understanding is that Android users (like myself) just stick with standard SMS/MMS in the US. Patiently waiting for Universal RCS to take off...

I know this is just anecdotal, but my friends and I do heavily use Hangouts.

It doesn't have enough functionality on its own, but I've augmented our experience with a chatbot powered by https://github.com/hangoutsbot/hangoutsbot.

Obviously I don't think that this experience is typical, not everyone is a programmer or has a server on which to run it.

Nope. Hangout is not at all a convenient app. Main Android apps after Whatsapp are Telegram, Kik, imo and WeChat.

Hangouts also does SMS. And, on Nexus phones at least, it does it by default.

The rest of the world does.

We non-US people will never understand this, sorry. Instead of staying in a single cross-platform system US people prolonged for other ~5 years the use of SMS that was non existing here for a long time, also paying the highest costs in the world per SMS more or less (AFAIK you used to pay even for receiving), and now are picking OS-specific platforms.

Also true for banking — The prominence of Apple and Android Pay is a direct response to the U.S. banking industries anti-competitive prices and poor adoption of global standards. Broadly speaking, Europe and SEA had contactless EMV chip payments well before the vendor-specific smartphone solutions.

I don't see many people in the US carrying Android devices. Everyone I see seems to have iPhone. Android is more concentrated in Asian and South American countries IMO.