On around June 18th, a number of Hangouts users began reporting that merged SMS/GVoice/Hangouts messages in Hangouts conversations were, well, unmerging. This obviously annoyed people, because this is an annoying thing to have happen.

About a week after that, a Google community manager responded to that Google Product Forums thread to let everyone know the team responsible had identified the issue and would be rolling out a fix "shortly." Well, we all know what that means in Google time (read: when it's done), but it looks this week that fix did begin to propagate. At least, sort of. Some users on the Google Product Forums and Reddit are reporting that Google Hangouts and phone SMS conversations are remerging themselves, but Google Voice users are still being left out in the cold, harsh, unmerged text wastes.

Given that the community manager on the GPF thread hasn't updated his own message as he said he would in order to reflect that the fix is going out, it's possible there will be multiple fixes by the time all is said and done, and that Google Voice SMSs are next on the list. Or that they'll never be fixed at all (see: Google) - you can never discount that option. We'll keep an eye on the forum post and word from Google Voice users specifically in the coming weeks to see if the situation is rectified.