Rich Communication Services (RCS) has been promoted as a replacement protocol for SMS, but it got off to a slow start and is still moving at a glacial pace. Even as phone form factors changed and Apple’s iPhone popularized the modern-day touchscreen smartphone, SMS remained the same, right down to the 160-character limit. By 2010, nearly 20 years after the first text message, cell subscribers exchanged 6.1 trillion messages.ĭespite the explosive growth of SMS, the tech didn’t evolve all that much from the 1990s. From then on, handset manufacturers and carriers climbed aboard the messaging bandwagon. ETSI engineers developed a framework that was both small enough to fit into the existing signaling paths (128 bytes, later improved to 160 seven-bit characters) and modular enough to support carrier management features like real-time billing, message rerouting (routing messages to a recipient other than the one specified by the user), and message blocking.Īfter nearly a decade of tinkering, SMS was deployed commercially in December 1992 - a milestone that engineer Neil Papworth marked by texting Merry Christmas to Vodafone customer Richard Jarvis. The idea was to transmit texts via the signaling systems that controlled telephone traffic. SMS was first proposed in 1982 for the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a second-generation cell standard devised by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The invention of text messaging predates the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Palm Pilot. You can also go to the Google Play Store to download Messages yourself.

A partnership between Google and Samsung allows RCS features to work seamlessly between the Samsung Messages and Android Messages apps, the default SMS apps on their devices. With Google’s rollout of RCS as Android’s primary texting platform for Android Messages, many Android phones already come with Android Messages installed. Google currently offers RCS chat worldwide via its Android Messages app to all users who install and use it as a default texting app.

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