The beloved SMS messaging service for mobile carriers will turn 21 this December, but will people celebrate?
SMS stands for “Short Message Service” which is used as the standard by mobile carriers for text messaging. A European media firm called Informa has conducted a study comparing SMS messages and free messaging apps like Apple iMessage, Blackberry Messenger, WhatApp and Samsung ChatON. These services combined have surpassed text messages sent from mobile devices.
Informa’s research states that an estimated 19 billion messages were sent world-wide last year via free messaging apps versus 17.6 billon SMS text messages. The free messaging versus SMS messages send ratio is expected to grow to 50 billion free messages to 21 billion SMS messages by 2014.
One benefit of free messaging in the world wide stage (beside being free) is that messages are sent over the internet which will not create international messaging fees. Of course, carriers don’t like this idea and are striving to keep SMS messaging alive. This is not surprising considering that over the next decade, 5 billion more users are expected to join the 2 billion already online, and most of them will be using smartphones as their only internet access point. They are looking at potentially losing billions of dollars, but I feel pretty confident they will figure out something. Maybe a fee for not using SMS?
Here is a related article that inspired mine: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2013/04/29/free-mobile-messaging-apps-will-be-the-death-of-sms-eventually/