Michal Ždanský The gradual retreat of SMS messages in favor of Instant Messaging is not a new phenomenon, but a trend that operators have been sadly following for several years. He has now set a new milestone. A single service surpassed classic SMS in the number of messages sent. WhatsApp, currently the world's most popular IM service, published new data - 700 million active users and above all 30 billion of messages sent per day. At the same time, around 20 billion SMS are sent worldwide.
A lead of around 50% indicates that WhatsApp surpassed SMS some time ago, however, with the official data, this milestone is confirmed. SMS, the most used short message system in the age of dumb phones, is on the decline with virtually no chance of improvement. Expensive text messages are being replaced by modern Instant Messaging services that use an Internet connection and push notifications to send and receive messages. Thanks to the presence of WhatsApp on practically all platforms, there is currently no place for the otherwise universal SMS.
But WhatsApp is not the only one pushing out SMS. Facebook Messenger is also very popular with more than 700 million users, Facebook also owns WhatsApp, among other things. Outside the United States and Europe, similar services dominate, namely WeChat, and Kik and Snapchat are also very popular worldwide.
The wild card in the field of Instant Messaging is iMessage, whose statistics have not been published for a long time. The last time Tim Cook mentioned some data was a year ago, namely "several billion iMessages" and 15 to 20 million FaceTime calls per day. Those numbers are likely to be higher today given that the service has an active base of roughly 400 million iPhones, at least according to analyst Benedict Evans. Overcoming SMS by iMessage could come within a few years.
The whole comparison between classic SMS and services like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger is nevertheless a bit distorted, because while in the original text messages people tried to fit as much information as possible into a single message because of the fee for each single message, in the era of instant messaging these habits are changing. This means sending a larger number of short messages, because the user does not pay for one message, but can send any number of them within the framework of his Internet tariff.
interesting...however, I am surprised that in the article about Instant Messaging Viber, which is relatively popular not only in our country, is not mentioned even once...
The writing is interesting, what IM actually does for a living…
Probably a good idea with an ill-conceived business model, in the case of whatsup a hit in the dark, the authors now enjoy Mr. Mark's dollars and Facebook milks the users a little differently, in the case of imessage it doesn't matter, they will contribute by buying iron.
A much bigger loss will be in the MMS category. Those operators buried them for a long time with high prices, and today, in most cases, people send them either by mistake or in cases of using a business card, etc.