From Germany comes the confirmation that text messages are an instrument less and less used by mobile users, even if the offers of the various telephone operators often include a substantial quantity without additional costs.
The reason is always the same: the many instant messaging services (such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, just to give a couple of examples) offer users more possibilities to personalize their messages and the “cold” SMS, therefore, remains a secondary option, often used only for business communications or with people you are not familiar with.
In 2018, users of mobile devices in Germany sent only 8.9 billion SMS, compared to 10.3 billion in the previous year, thus registering a new low which, most likely, will be exceeded this year.
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The RCS standard, now available for several years but still not very widespread, could be the only option capable of questioning the overwhelming power of instant messaging services.
The first SMS to a mobile phone was sent 26 years now, on Dec 1992, for Vodafone by a 22-year-old engineer named Neil Papworth. While mobile phones at the time lacked the ability to type out and send individual letters of the alphabet, Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group (now Airwide Solutions), from his personal computer sent the first text message to Richard Jarvis mobile phone on the Vodafone network on this day December 3, 1992. The message simply reads: āMerry Christmasā
The SMS or short messaging service didnāt quite gain a lot of popularity, partly due to non-pervasive nature of cellular networks and difficulty in typing out letters. A year later, Nokia introduced the SMS feature to its mobile devices, with a 160-character limit, and fast forward to 1999, and with advancement in mobile phones technology, the text messages began to gain widespread acceptability, as it could then be exchanged over different telecom cellular networks.
