I was having the same problem with my message plus. If I sent a message it took forever to send, wouldn't show the message on my end as having been read. If I tried to use any of the special emoji it froze my phone. After sometime I think I finally found a way to fix it with out doing a factory reset of my phone and risking loosing all my info. I went into application manager, opened the message plus app, force stopped it, a message came up asking if I wanted to replace it with the original,I said yes. It replaced it with the original that had a little green man. I agreed to the Verizon terms. After I made sure all of my texts were ok I went to the play store and found message plus. From there I reloaded it and selected update not download. It downloaded to the old version and replaced the little green guy with the message plus symbol I'm used to seeing. It's working great. All of my texts are sending and receiving like they should and I'm able to use the fancy emoji.