The North American MMS party on Voice is complete. Verizon now supports Voice MMS, software engineer Dylan Salisbury recently announced on +. Verizon’s Voice MMS hook-up follows an announcement in early October that included every other major North American carrier was supporting Voice MMS. (MMS is the technology that support sending multimedia images via text messages.)

Beyond Verizon support, Salisbury said is also adding native Voice MMS photo messaging in Hangouts. If you merge Voice with Hangouts on Android, that means photos will now show up natively instead of a text message with a link. Salisbury also promised that group messaging via MMS is coming to Voice in Hangouts very soon.

The impact on you at home: The new update means users can now use their Voice number on Hangouts with little difference from using a carrier-supplied number. That’s good news for anyone who relies on Hangouts Voice. But it’s really not a huge deal if you’ve already moved your MMS activity to the massive crop of dedicated messaging apps out there such as BBM, Facebook Messenger, ne, Viber, atsapp.

How long?

As with the announcement in October, Voice’s deep integration with Hangouts raises the question of how long Voice will st on its own. In h, rumors suggested that planned on killing Voice as a stalone service folding all of its functionality into Hangouts.

That has happened to a certain extent, but Voice still exists as a distinct separate service with its own Android app website. The fact that Voice is U.S. only while Hangouts is available around the globe may play into the long, slow merger of the two services.

[via Android lice]