Even though smartphones have been on the market for over 10 years, mobile phone users still preferred to use SMS texts in order to communicate with other cell phones, especially when carriers bundle text messages with certain plans. But it looks like instant messaging through a number of applications has finally caught up with SMS texts, and in fact, has overtake it according to Informa.
Research firm Informa believes nearly 19 billion instant messages were sent per day in 2012 through chat applications, which has finally overtaken SMS texts which only 17.6 billion texts were sent in the same year. The 19 billion instant messages were spread across six of the most popular mobile chat applications: WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple’s iMessage and KakaoTalk.
Informa believes the growth of instant messages will continue as they predict nearly 50 billion messages will be sent over the next year through chat applications, while SMS will only hit a total of 21 billion texts in the same year.