#TBT: When did SMS give way to messenger apps?

In the past, SMS was a great form of communication. The reasons were clear: practicality and cost-effectiveness. But do you remember when was the last time you used the SMS or MMS service after WhatsApp arrived? I remember, it was last night!

I remember today as a time when my Nokia 3310 and I had a great relationship, especially since I had won the device in conjunction with a postpaid plan in which I could send up to 30 free text messages per month. It really helped me keep my cellphone bill close to what a journalism intern in Brazil could afford at the time.

Since an SMS contains only 160 characters, it was always necessary to be as accurate as possible not to send two messages instead of one and end up wasting an SMS. Alis, the acronym comes from Short Message Service, which in Portuguese would be Short Message Service.

Opinion by Camila Rinaldi

Now we send out a huge amount of messages every day and just getting them is impossible.

After a while, my carrier, Vivo, started offering 10 messages (or text messages) a day through its official website, so that gave me one more breath in the budget. But best of all was when Orkut arrived, my communication flowed that it was a beauty. Following, social networks like Facebook or the MSN messaging service did the trick.

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SMS made me save on my phone bill / AndroidPIT
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<p>However, many waters have been rolling since college time. Today my contract has 3,000 free messages and I have at least three instant messaging applications installed on my smartphone: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Allo.</p>
<h2 id=When did SMS give way to messenger applications?

The funny thing is that even with services like Facebook and Orkut, SMS was still king in the days of feature phones, or cell phones like my Nokia 3310, because the internet wasn't really popular on cell phones. But then, Viber came, and then WhatsApp, and now we send a huge amount of messages every day, and counting them is simply impossible.

SMS is far from past

AndroidPIT throwback thursday sms 3
The torpedo what saves us when the network falls / AndroidPIT

However, SMS is far from being a thing of the past. To give you an idea, just in France, during the last quarter of 2015, 52.2 billion SMSs were sent, an increase of 2.1% over the previous year. One of the big reasons for this is surely the fact that when we need instant messaging services the most, they don't work due to network congestion. The case of this growth in the number of SMS messages in France, for example, is directly linked to the fact of the holidays.

Yesterday, for example, I was in a bar where I had no chance to connect to the internet, and to warn my friends where I was, I had to resort to good old text messaging. Before that, I had used the resources two weeks ago, when I needed to communicate with my friends in the middle of the Lollapalooza festival.

And taking advantage of our #TBT article series, I would like to know when was the last time you sent an SMS and why?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll send a text message and I'll be right back!


Throwback Thursday (#TBT) in Portuguese would be something like Throwback Thursday. It's a hashtag that is used for people every Thursday to post photos, videos, or anything that has happened for a while. Every Thursday, you will follow here on AndroidPIT our publishers' past experiences with smartphones, gadgets and tablets. Stay tuned!

. (tagsToTranslate) Throwback Thursday (t) TBT SMS