Hangouts (or equivalent) availability for seamless Google Voice (WiFi Calling/texting)?

[PGrey]

I've been reading forums here, reading articles, and trying to sort this out.
Some people have posted, making it sound as if they've got this, installed on W10m?
It's hard to discern though, some of the posts make it sound like maybe it's a third party app (none of these get consistently good reviews).

I'm just trying to get a decent WiFi calling solution working, until a US carrier decides to support it natively, on Win phone. In the meantime, I have a GV account, and can run the web-page in the background, but the usefulness is spotty, at best.
The way I have it set up, I just forward my current carrier #, when I know I'll be out of cell reach, but have WiFi access.
Sometimes it works great, my phone rings, my outgoing calls, all work seamless, through the native phone app.
Usually text doesn't work, incoming sort of works, maybe, and outgoing always requires me to send via the GV web-page.

From what I read, and screens I've found, if you have Hangouts this is seamless, on whatever platform
I'm hoping there's a more definitive answer for this, or even a Beta for Hangouts, that we can sign up for?

Skype is NOT an option, it drains my phone, even doing nothing, reducing my average battery life by about 75%. The website, running in the background is about a 5-10% hit, which is reasonable, if the calls/texts were more consistent.

I really, really hate that we're subsidizing the iOS and now some Android phones with full WiFi Calling, on our carrier, yet they won't provision us, even though we're fully capable (950XL), without any h/w or s/w changes on their part...

Any help/hints/pointers, all are appreciated, thanks.

 

[realwarder]

Skype does not use any noticeable battery on my 950XL and appears to be reliable. So I'd say it was a good option.

Those carriers that do support OS level Wi-Fi calling (T-Mobile in USA) typically only enable it on a branded phone.

 

[PGrey]

Weird, what build (I'm on 420)? I had a massive battery drain yesterday, the worst I've ever seen on W10m, and as soon as I disabled Skype (it only got enabled, when I had an incoming call, apparently it enabled itself, see my other post), everything went back to normal, battery-wise.

T-Mobile supports it on quite a few Android phones, some of which aren't branded, they seem to be the most "flexible", if you can call it that, at least compared to the other carriers they look great (I wish they had decent coverage in WA state...).
The only Windows phone they support it on is branded, but it's an exclusive, so it's not so interesting in that regard, but they definitely don't support un-branded Windows devices, even though they could, with very minimal work on their side. I think there was sort of a "falling out" between execs there, or similar, you can read bits-and-pieces of things, if you hunt around.

Hangouts would really help things, as I could forward my number when I was WiFi only, kind of a hassle, and a hack, but still functional. The way it works right now though, is pretty unreliable, unfortunately. At first I thought it was working, and then I'd find missed calls and the like, and then there's the text non-integration, but that's probably a lot harder to hook, from their mobile Google Voice page.