Chat apps overtake text messaging in popularity worldwide: study

Five years ago, if you wanted to send someone a message, there’s a good chance you wrote them a text. But with the growing popularity of messaging apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and other devices, that’s increasingly no longer the case.

According to a study commissioned by the Financial Times, more instant messages were being sent by the end of last year than text messages, FT.com reports. Looking at trends around the world, consulting group Informa expects messaging through apps to more than double this year to 41 billion per day, which is more than twice the number of text messages expected.

And it’s not surprising, if you look at the apps currently gaining popularity in Canada. WhatsApp Messenger was the top paid iPhone app in Canada last week, and Kik Messenger is quickly gaining ground too, announcing earlier this month that it now has more than 50 million users. Social networking giant Facebook clearly has its sights set on the messaging market with its new Chat Heads messaging service integrated with the Facebook app for smartphones, and the Facebook Home user interface for Android.

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There are also built-in messaging apps that encourage users with the same brand of phone to send messages without ever using SMS: Apple’s iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger are both extremely popular with users of those devices.

It’s clear that this shift from texting to in-app messaging is going to eventually hurt the bottom line of mobile service providers, too. Just last week, TELUS raised the price of its Canada-to-International text messages from 15 cents to 40 cents per SMS sent, showing it’s definitely an area where the company aims to make some money.

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This isn’t the end of SMS just yet, though. Informa predicts that there’s still some life left in traditional text messaging, and expects providers will still generate more than $120 billion from SMS this year.

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