Whitepaper reveals the messaging industry remains strong

Post by Jason Unrein, Senior Product Marketing Manager for AT&T

AT&T collaborated with Frost & Sullivan on a whitepaper about the state of the messaging industry. The research reveals that the industry is far from static. In fact, the messaging industry has undergone a major evolution, and will continue to do so. Here are some excerpts that provide a glimpse at the enlightening information found throughout the whitepaper:

On the strength of messaging in the market:

Leading cross-platform messaging applications offered by over-the-top (OTT) providers such as WhatsApp and WeChat have billions of monthly active users and continue to report strong growth rates. Even with the emergence of these communication channels, SMS continues to remain a preferred mobile communication service around the world. The Cellular Telecommunications Internet Association’s (CTIA) 2016 Industry Survey, for example, indicates that over 1.9 trillion text messages were exchanged in the United States alone over the last year. Moreover, Frost & Sullivan estimates that text communications have an ‘open rate’ of over 90%, which is higher than both email and OTT applications. The popularity of SMS is largely driven by the availability of the SMS client in all mobile phones and the overall simplicity and versatility of text services.

And that’s just the beginning. In order for any type of messaging technology to remain relevant, it will need to continue to evolve…

Frost & Sullivan believes the SMS market will continue to see a variety of opportunities triggered by both human and application interactions. While peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging remains strong, a broad range of application-to person (A2P) and peer-to-application (P2A) use cases have emerged as important growth drivers for text messaging. The inherent flexibility of SMS makes it an attractive option for serving the communication needs for a variety of application categories.

Companies have to be willing to evolve in order to support new trends. This last excerpt mentions how AT&T has made our messaging service accessible to developers through an API. This allows for developers to keep their apps relevant in the continually evolving messaging space:

SMS continues to serve the communication and collaboration needs of consumers and businesses. However, there is a need to integrate messaging with various modern communication technologies to ensure that it remains relevant. This whitepaper will highlight how in-app messaging—defined as the ability to send and receive text messages from within mobile applications—is a powerful use case that can help messaging stay relevant in emerging mobile and connected scenarios. It will explore the role and importance of APIs in supporting next-generation communication services. Additionally, Frost & Sullivan will examine how AT&T is driving the relevance of messaging through its In- App Messaging API and Webhooks enhancements. Finally, this paper will analyze the AT&T DriveMode application and AT&T’s Amazon In-App Messaging Echo Skill service to uncover how the in-app messaging API can be used in emerging mobile and connected environments.

These excerpts are only from the first page of the whitepaper. You can find more detail and insights in the 15 pages of research and analysis performed by Frost & Sullivan on the subject. For an interesting read and to discover how you can keep your app relevant with the help of messaging, please download the whitepaper from our In-App Messaging tour page.