30% of people in the UK still send SMS messages daily, study finds
The humble SMS message is now celebrating its 30th anniversary since the first ever text was sent in 1992.
However, text messages remain an essential means of communication for people in the UK, with a third revealing that they still send and receive them daily.
The first text message was sent on a then cutting-edge Orbitel 901 phone by a UK-based Vodafone engineer on the 3rd of December 1992.
The test message simply read “Merry Christmas”, and it didn’t receive a reply from its recipient, Vodafone boss Richard Jarvis.
It would be another decade before SMS, an acronym for Short Message Service, really took off as mobile phones surged in popularity.
While the number of SMS messages sent plunged from 150 billion in 2012 to 40 billion in 2021 amid a rise in instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, the service still endures.
Research by Infobip shows that 30% of people still send them every day and 54% believe that SMS is still crucial for communicating with people who have not signed up for digital apps.
Despite the emergence of new tech, the service is also still used by the NHS and some companies to confirm appointments and to authenticate login information for webpages.
There are some limitations to SMS though as they are not completely secure due to the lack of end-to-end encryption.
However, Infobip UK country manager Nikhil Shoorji says that SMS is also surprisingly popular with younger Gen Z consumers who did not grow up with the service.
He added that brands could miss out on reaching and engaging with target audiences if they fail to recognise the ongoing popularity of SMS.