Text Messaging Featured Article

There has been a lot of buzz lately over the role of apps in the world of mobile communication. More specifically, there are many out there who argue that messaging apps will overtake traditional SMS and render the technology obsolete. But their reasoning leaves many holes, and fails to look at the bigger picture. SMS continues to be highly ubiquitous, not just in the consumer arena, but in the business world as well, and offers a host of advantages that messaging apps just can’t beat.

One of the main arguments circulating in favor of apps is that they are easier to use than SMS—and yet text messaging is the simplest form of messaging you can use on your phone. Anything else requires you to go to the app store, download the app (which, in turn, requires a decent data plan), and then you need to set up an account before you can begin using it. With SMS, you already have an account—your phone number. There’s no need to give a third party any information about yourself, as it’s all taken care of through your carrier. To send a text message, all you need is the recipient’s phone number. Plain and simple.

Furthermore, with a messaging app, you need to create yet another username and password to remember, and then only send messages to other people who use that same app. SMS is nowhere near that restrictive, and involves far fewer steps. Granted, downloading an app is not exactly a complicated procedure, but to say that it’s easier to use than SMS is a stretch.

Supporters of messaging apps also point to their features, such as stickers, games and group messaging, as well as the fact that these services are largely free. It’s not hard to understand the appeal of something new and interesting, but do these apps have the same staying power of traditional text messaging? They may cost nothing to download, but they use up data that you’re paying for on your device’s carrier plan anyway. It’s also been recently reported that, in the United Kingdom, app usage has skyrocketed. The key to remember here is who is actually using those apps. In large part, the growth of app use has been driven by consumers, not businesses. And beyond that, the consumer demographic with the heaviest use of messaging apps is teenagers—certainly not indicative of the consumer majority.

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Trying out messaging apps is an understandable phenomenon. When a new technology comes out, it’s interesting and unknown, and if it’s free, why not give it a shot? However, as Jon Lauer, CEO of Zipwhip, wrote in a recent blog post, “Are these OTT services truly a threat to the prominence of the SMS medium overall? Are these novelty services ever going to replace text messaging as the preferred form of high priority communications? Absolutely not. When people need to send and receive important messages, they’re going to use the native SMS app on their device that sends a message from the phone number everyone knows.”

Apps are new and appealing, but SMS is by no means a static technology to be surpassed—it’s growing and changing at a rapid rate. Consumers and businesses alike can now text-enable any phone number, making text messages incredibly easy to send, and even more accessible to the mainstream. People can now send texts from tons of platforms and devices, too. Users can send messages as texts from their email addresses, from their tablets and desktops. The days of SMS being limited to your cell phone are over.