- In 2021, 7.8 billion SMS were sent in Germany
- This compares to around 280 billion messenger messages
- On December 3rd, SMS turned 30 years old
Congratulations, SMS!
30 years after their introduction, such text messages are still being sent. Not nearly as many as before - but still enough for the 160-character service to remain important. While 59.8 billion text messages were sent in the record year of 2012, the number fell to a low of 7.0 billion in 2020. In 2021 there were again 7.8 billion short messages. The digital association Bitkom reports this based on data from the Federal Network Agency.
“SMS remains important even after its all-time high in 2012. “Not just for people who don’t own a smartphone, but especially for authentication procedures, for example for payment services,” says Bitkom Managing Director Dr. Bernhard Rohleder. “The SMS standard has the advantage that it works on every cell phone and does not require an internet connection or special registration. Most mobile phone tariffs also usually include an SMS flat rate, so there are no additional costs.”
The world's first SMS (short message service) was sent on December 3, 1992 in Great Britain - from a computer to a cell phone it said "Merry Christmas". SMS was originally intended to relay technical information about network disruptions, but then it became extremely popular among the general population for messages of all kinds. The short message containing a maximum of 160 characters made it possible for the first time to transmit texts over the mobile phone network, regardless of time and place.

Around 1994, the popularity of short messages increased rapidly among cell phone users. Rawhide:
“In 2009, WhatsApp came onto the market, a service that helped instant messengers achieve a breakthrough and sent SMS into decline.”
According to Bitkom surveys, 88 percent of people over 16 in Germany currently use a smartphone or conventional cell phone - that corresponds to around 61 million people. As a representative survey by the digital association Bitkom in 2021 showed, they receive an average of 13 short messages every day. According to this, more than 790 million short messages are received by smartphone and cell phone users every day. Minus SMS, this adds up to around 280 billion messenger messages in 2021 as a whole. Increasingly, short messages are no longer just typed, but written using a voice assistant: 44 percent of smartphone users also write text messages using a voice assistant, according to a Bitkom survey in spring 2022.
Source: Bitkom
Also read: First SMS, then WhatsApp > Beware of fake children on WhatsApp
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