It has been an unbelievable 20 years since the first text message was sent. It was sent by a Vodafone engineer and it simply read “Merry Christmas”. Coming up to the present day, there are now an astonishing 4 trillion text messages sent a year.
Back in 1995 when text messaging was finally launched for the public, it was met with a very underwhelming response. Most phone manufacturers back then saw text messaging as a luxury service, so it wasn’t on every phone and they were very un-user-friendly for text messaging.
There was also a further and much more serious problem that hindered the growth of text messaging, they only worked between phones on the same mobile network. This was a massive stumbling block to make text messages useful in its early years.
In 1998, the UK networks finally came together and negotiated a way for all phone users to text each other regardless of network. Better still, the phones had got considerably better – you’d be on a Nokia 3210 now or equivalent so it was far easier to read and send messages.
The difference this made to SMS usage was staggering. The “luxury service” was then responsible for 1 billion messages a year.
When it comes to growing a network, you don’t want to be closed off and “tight-knitted” or you are a niche community. In hollywood terms, this is like having a cult-hit rather than a box office smash – one makes a ton of money, the other barely covers its budget.
By opening up the SMS service to all networks, it meant that the barrier to entry for most people was considerably smaller and that they could easily share the usefulness of SMS with their friends who had mobile phones.
One crucial part of mobile phone history also happened around this time, the dawn of the pay as you go mobile phone becoming affordable. Not only was it simpler to share texts with your friends, the adoption rate of mobile phones went through the roof, particularly with the sub-prime market and teenagers.
You may (or may not depending on your love of mobile gadgetry) be surprised to hear that this is the first year that SMS sent figures have decreased. Surely we haven’t grown less fond of sending each other messages? To answer that loaded question – of course not.
There are some new kids on the block though that are making SMS look tired, old and the binary radio coding that it is. You may have heard of them. In no particularly order, they are Blackberry Messenger (BBM) and iMessage.
These newer messaging apps allow you to see if someone is typing (which helps “chatting” interaction) send photos without paying MMS charges, send sound clips and even see if someone has switched their phone off. Even better, when it comes to BBM and iMessage, they are part of their respective smartphone OS. A further trump card of iMessage is that it’s the default setting for messaging on iOS devices, meaning that you have to opt-in for SMS texting between iPhones on your settings.
So if you happen to have access to these services that offer more than just plain text, why would you use SMS? It appears that’s what most people are doing now.
To get an estimate of how these apps could be affecting SMS usage, we need some basic numbers on how many devices have access to these services.
Estimates show that there are 6 billion phones worldwide all of which will have SMS access. There are a combined 470 million iMessage and BBM users. Less than you expected?
The SMS decline can be also blamed on other services outside of default messaging services such as Whatsapp and the mobile messaging syncing of Twitter and Facebook.
With SMS having such a lead over other services, what would it take to overcome this service? If you’ve learnt from mobile networks past, it would be for one of the alternative services to offer a cross-platform solution that would be integrated as part of the all smartphones OS’. Sounds simple. No one has done it successfully yet though.
As part of Blackberry strategy plans a year ago it was rumoured that there would be a cross-platform BBM app. When Apple came out with iMessage, that seem to put paid to any ideas that we would see a BBM app on the iPhone.
If anyone can topple SMS then it would be Facebook. They have no preference in terms of smartphone OS and no allegiance to any mobile network provider. With their Facebook Messenger app, they are already trying their best to make their messages service ubiquitous and all-encompassing.
Again, if rumours are true – we should be seeing a Facebook smartphone with a propriety OS.
Do you think we’ll ever be without text messaging?