Everything you need to know about the SMS successor! Text messages — the communications tech we’ve used since the 1990s — are showing their age. They don’t perform the way we now want them to: They don’t support encryption, read receipts, group messaging, or the animated stickers everyone likes to trade on apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. They rely on a cellular connection — and a signal — and limit you to just 160 characters. Despite those restrictions, old habits die hard. Text messaging or SMS (Short Message Service) still gets plenty of love from the public with some 781 billion text messages sent every month and more than 9.3 trillion texts per year in the United States, according to 2017 numbers from Statistic Brain. According to Statista, the number of SMS messages sent in the United States actually jumped 15.8% from 2017 to 2018 to 2 trillion. In 2019, that number held steady at 2 trillion messages exchanged. Despite the popularity of SMS messagin