Today we’re launching the newest version of Hangouts for Android, rolling out to the Play store over the next few days. Highlights include:

- Merged conversations: SMS and Hangout conversations with the same recipient are now combined into a single conversation. You can control whether you want to send a message via Hangouts or SMS with the flip of a switch, and different message types will be easy to tell apart in the conversation. Of course, you can always merge and unmerge conversations if you’d like.Google Announces Merged SMS and Hangouts Conversations [plus.google.com]