The standard messaging app will be the one that allows cellular and wi-fi multi-partner MMS with read receipts across Android and iOS ecosystems. All it would take is for Google and Apple to have a beer, hammer out a standard and crush all competition without so much as hiring a coder. Some perspective on Snapchat: They claim 100m active users. Twitter claims 300m active users. Translated: 90% of internet-connected people have never used Twitter. An "active user" by the way is anyone who hasn't deleted their account. I count as seven users, by the way, and I think I've tweeted a dozen times. So snapchat? Yeahnotsomuch.
I really wish Google's Voice/Hangouts systems were more fleshed out and full featured. Where Voice takes care of SMS but not MMS, Hangouts manages messaging with too many features. If Google, Microsoft, and Apple could simply include a default inter-operative messaging protocol that wasn't SMS or MMS, we would finally be moving forward on the messaging front. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening any time soon. I'll keep my fingers crossed, though.
Expect Google Voice/Hangouts to become a full-fledged, fully functional aspect of Google Fi. Google seems to be more interested in direct revenue these days, rather than B2B... and now that they're a wireless provider with their own hardware, that's the kind of magic they can do. Apple makes iMessage work through a bunch of ad-hoc haxies on a half-dozen protocols. That's how they roll. It makes it really hard to interface with. Google, on the other hand, is going to want their ecosystem to behave for eleventy dozen vendors. They'll come up with a hard protocol. The question is whether they'll get enough marketshare that Apple users will be annoyed by their iMessages not working outside of the Apple ecosystem. There are grumblings now but we're a ways from a tipping point.
I thought the whole thing was a bit overly optimistic when he said this: "I asked the 8 of my friends who use Snapchat most how they use Snapchat Chat (this includes my younger cousins and friends who range in age from 17–29). They all said they don’t use it. I don’t either. But by making Chat a primary feature of the app, everyone will." I don't use it. No one I asked has used it. But just by moving the chat button to the camera, everyone will use it. That's not very strong market research.