Evolve SMS
One of the peculiar aspects of Android is that theoretically, everything is replaceable. This includes phone features, which initially seems odd, the fact that you can replace your phone dialler with something else.
Generally I’ve found the default apps fine for calls and sms, but since Google’s move to Hangouts to replace the sms app and it’s seeming (but unfulfilled, yet) promise to consolidate all communication into one app, which whilst pretty, is infuriating slow.
I took this as an opportunity to replace my sms app and started looking around and trying many of the options.
I found most either, ugly, buggy or just over feature heavy for what I needed, but have eventually settled on a relative new comer, evolve sms.
It’s lean, but with extra features that can be enabled if you need them. It is holo like enough, but with its own sense of style to (which also means it has an annoying tendency to ignore some visual settings such as text highlighting and notification settings from other 3rd party apps) but that aside it’s stable and comes with a bunch of generally useful features such as quick preview popups and quick message access.
It also has a bunch of extra features that can be unlocked outside of the free version if you want to take those extra steps and updates stability and features regularly.