Help Unable to text when using Lyft and other apps

[salilsurendran]

Hello,
When I use apps like Lyft on my Honor 5x and I try to text the driver etc. it tries to launch 'Hangouts' and then dies with a message 'In order to use Hangouts for SMS set Hangouts as the defaults SMS app'. However, I don't want to set Hangouts as my default SMS app but I find no way to clear the defaults on the default messaging app on my android phone. How do I change the default messaging app for apps like Lyft? I tried clearing the defaults and even uninstalled and reinstalled the apps but to no avail.