Manage your account
…
Texting has changed over the past few years. With Android phones‘ adoption of RCS messaging in 2019 and Apple’s reluctant acceptance of the new standard earlier this year in iOS 18, legacy SMS texting is less relevant. Still, SMS is hanging on, especially in the United States. SMS use peaked in the US in 2011 with 2.3 trillion SMS and MMS messages sent. However, the number of SMS messages sent in the US has been relatively stable for over a decade, even as SMS use declines in other markets. So why does the US love SMS texting, and what’s next for the legacy standard?
The technology underpinning early mobile text messaging began development in the 1980s. The short message service (SMS) protocol was implemented in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) in 1991. The first SMS message sent to a mobile phone was in December 1992 by an engineer for IT services company Sema Group named Neil Papworth (it read “Merry Christmas”). The first commercial SMS service launched in Sweden in 1993.
Text messaging functionality gained traction in the mid-90s. In the early days, text messages could only be sent within a given network. Inter-network SMS didn’t become standard until 1999. That interoperability helped texting become the thing over the next few years, with an estimated 250 billion SMS messages sent by 2002.
Despite popular competing options offering more features (such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram), SMS texting remains prevalent. There aren’t firm numbers on how many texts are sent daily worldwide. One commonly cited figure claims 23 billion per day as of 2021, but that data seems to stem from a post on TechJury.net that has been updated and no longer makes claims about global SMS use. Statista reports that 2 trillion SMS texts were sent in the US and 49 billion in the UK in 2021.
A prevalent theory floating around the internet says that SMS is disproportionately popular in the US due to past carrier incentives. Unlimited SMS messaging was apparently offered as part of American mobile phone plans earlier and more widely in the US than in other markets. SMS took off in the US, while internet-based messaging platforms like WhatsApp flourished in places like Europe and South America. As the story goes, this set a messaging precedent that’s still in place years later.
Information about phone plans from 30 years ago is hard to find, so that line of reasoning is tricky to prove. It makes sense in theory, but I think additional factors played into SMS’s trajectory over the years.
For one, early SMS texting was simpler for many US users than for people living in places like Europe. Mobile carriers in the US function interoperably nationwide with no unexpected fees. For example, a Verizon customer in New York can send an SMS text to an AT&T customer in Los Angeles without international plan add-ons or penalties. The European Union, meanwhile, only guaranteed price caps for SMS texts sent from one EU country to another in 2019. There are no such considerations with data-based platforms like WhatsApp, which could have spurred its adoption in markets where users are more likely to communicate with people outside their country.
The growing stateside popularity of the iPhone could have played a role. Messages sent between iPhones using iMessage have always used a data connection. Until this year, messages sent from iPhones to other devices relied on SMS. Apple devices have always been disproportionately popular in the US. Still, in SMS-record-setting 2011, nearly one in three active iPhones were used in the United States (115 million devices, up from 60 million the year prior).
The years following iMessage’s 2011 introduction saw a decline in US SMS use, bottoming out at 1.5 trillion texts sent in 2017, per Statista. Even so, iPhone users messaging over iMessage (to each other) and SMS (to everybody else) may have buoyed carrier-based texting in the United States. At the same time, alternatives like WhatsApp gained momentum in markets where the iPhone was less popular and carrier texting was comparatively more complex.
While SMS remains popular in the United States, it’s seen a sharp decline year over year in markets like the UK and India. As RCS becomes more universal in the years to come, it seems inevitable that SMS use will decline further worldwide. Still, SMS remains the fallback for RCS and iMessage (in cases where RCS chat isn’t available) and is still the only texting option on many devices, particularly feature phones. So, we don’t expect to see the legacy standard disappear soon.
Audio
Computing
Gaming
Phones
Science
Home Entertainment
Streaming
VPN
Wearables
Deals
Advertise
About our ads
Licensing
Careers
Help
Feedback
Follow us on
© 2025 Yahoo. All rights reserved.