Yup. I got my SO to try out Signal as an alternative to SMS, so hopefully that works. If we can consistently use it, I'm going to nudge my other contacts (mostly my family members) to switch as well, because it's certainly better than SMS. Signal is the most popular SMS alternative AFAICT, so it's the safe choice.

That said, I installed Simplex on both my phones and connected them, and my kids had a blast sending messages to each other. I'm going to keep playing with it and probably host my own collection of nodes, but so far, the implementation details bleed through and kind of tarnish the user experience. I'll keep messing with it though, and maybe we'll end up using it as an in-house chat or something as a kind of Discord alternative. Or maybe I'll host a Matrix node. We'll see.