[berdario]

I used to use Google Talk, but I find Hangouts sometimes unreliable. Nowadays I only use Hangouts with my mother (because she doesn't want to switch to other services).

I dislike to use something closed source like Whatsapp, but it's not like Hangouts, Telegram or Line are much better (almost no one I know is connecting to Google's servers with XMPP, and Telegram doesn't have an open source server implementation)

I started to use Telegram recently, thanks to my Ubuntu phone, but I don't like the fact that it's storing the messages unencrypted server-side. Whatsapp is much better on this front, since everything is encrypted by default, and usage across multiple devices (i.e. desktop) is handled wonderfully by the webapp.

OTOH, neither Whatsapp nor Telegram afaik give you any way to verify the identify of the other person, and E2E encryption without identity verification is of dubious utility... TextSecure is nice, but it has only barely more users than Telegram