Interesting story in the BBC (Other news services are available) today that Chat app messaging has finally taken over SMS in terms of volume of messages sent. There are a myriad of group messaging apps which seem to have finally broken the SMS camel's back? Hmmm unlikely!
I am glad the BBC story also covers the following discussion:
"most of the chat apps were used by consumers who own smartphones. However, ... there are a large number of consumers, especially in emerging and lesser developed economies, who use normal mobile phones and rely on SMS as the preferred messaging tool."
SMS as an effective means of communication, across EVERY SINGLE mobile phone often escapes the press coverage of its demise. What also is often missed is discussion about how SMS could (and should) evolve through use within the machine to machine (M2M) world.
There are worlds of growth available to SMS that would be greatly aided by one thing. Mobile carriers that whine and moan about the death of SMS and it's dwindling revenue need to ask themselves one thing - what are they doing to support it's growth. Largely from an outsiders perspective very little. As an entrepreneur trying to engage with Customers through SMS it is a difficult process should you want to do this through a mobile carrier. Sure it's pretty easy through an OTT player like say Twilio, or Nexmo, but what are the carriers doing to support innovation?
Other than allow their Customers to send SMS between mobile networks the mobile carriers have done almost nothing to innovate with SMS since the very first SMS was sent on the 3rd of December in 1992. To be honest carriers have been lucky to be able to milk the SMS cash cow for this long, without continually providing innovation with respect to SMS. Now that revenues have peaked and are starting to reduce, if carriers want to rely on SMS as a growth revenue stream they need to act.
SMS is largely a closed market though. The only way to access SMS was to own a handset and manually type the text into your phone and send it. OK there has always been access to aggregators to provide access for developers to SMS. This access is continually becoming cheaper and easier allowing any developer to engage with it. However developer access to SMS is driven not be carriers, but rather by aggregators and OTT players.
If carriers wish to embrace innovation on what is rapidly becoming a stale product then they need to open up to the possibility of innovation by others. Innovation is most likely to not come from an internal source but rather from an external party. The only way to play in the game and potentially share in the spoils is to open up developer access to core assets, in a sensible way. Why for instance, as a developer, can I not buy a SIM (or virtual SIM) with the same tariff that a regular mobile phone customer has access to - so access to a bundle of SMS that I can use within my application. This is just one very simple option (one of many!) that a carrier could entertain. As it stands at the moment any engagement surrounding SMS or Voice (two core assets of the mobile carrier) through a carrier is simply too hard to do. This is why developers are queuing up at OTT players to get access.
Cheers
m
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