[andyking]

When I was in a long-distance relationship a couple of years ago and couldn't SMS internationally without re-mortgaging, we made heavy use of an Android app called Kik which also had this very useful feature. It had four indicators, if I remember correctly. "..." meant it was pending and you were having network/signal issues, "S" meant the Kik server had received it from your network, and the "D" and "R" were delivered and read.

I didn't know Google Hangouts had it. How does it display the read indicator? I find the interface a little... obtuse, to say the least!