To make the service more valuable and competitive with popular, feature-rich messaging apps, smartphone manufacturers, carriers, and the cell phone industry’s governing agencies developed the Rich Communication Services (RCS) protocol (otherwise called RCS Chat), which is designed as a modern take on texting that rolls features from Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and WhatsApp into one platform. In 2019, that number held steady at 2 trillion messages exchanged.ĭespite the popularity of SMS messaging, some people need more than it’s capable of providing. According to Statista, the number of SMS messages sent in the United States actually jumped 15.8% from 2017 to 2018 to 2 trillion. Text messaging or SMS (Short Message Service) still gets plenty of love from the public with some 781 billion text messages sent every month and more than 9.3 trillion texts per year in the United States, according to 2017 numbers from Statistic Brain. Despite those restrictions, old habits die hard. They rely on a cellular connection - and a signal - and limit you to just 160 characters.
They don’t perform the way we now want them to: They don’t support encryption, read receipts, group messaging, or the animated stickers everyone likes to trade on apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. Text messages - the communications tech we’ve used since the 1990s - are showing their age.
