iPhone Texting Question

As of this writing, iPhone users have 4 different texting plans to choose from with AT&T. The first and probably the most nefarious is the “Pay Per Use” plan which will cost you $0.20 per text message. The second is the “200 Text Messages” plan that affords 200 text messages a month for $5. From there you can choose the “1500 Text Messages” plan that will cost you $15 a month and the “Unlimited Text Messages” plan that will cost $20 ($30 for a family talk plan) a month. These costs are in addition to any voice and data plans that have already been chosen.

Now that texting is more popular among US mobile users that phone calls (I’m certain that it’s been more popular in other countries for a while) it’s easy to see that this is a lucrative market for AT&T (and other carriers) to be in. It’s so lucrative that it’s netted carriers a total of 100 billion dollars globally.

Before we answer the question, “Why is texting so expensive?” we have to understand what a text message is. A text message, referred to in tech circles as an SMS message, is a text message that is either 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters (used for binary messages only) or 70 16-bit characters.

What does all of that mean?

A single text message is tiny, microscopic even, in the day and age of high speed data connections. On a 350GB drive (the standard size of a hard drive on a MacBook Pro), you could store approximately 2,348,810,240 text messages. Here is another example; a Lacuna Coil song (8 MB) is the equivalent of 57,344 text messages. If I were to use SMS to download a song (without a plan) it would cost me $11,469!

If you want a more detailed analysis of text messages costs, I would suggest reading the article The True Price of SMS Messages.

Once it’s broken down it’s easy to understand why users and Congress are asking the same question, “Why the hell is texting so expensive?”

One answer, put simply by the article The Rising Cost of Texting, is because it can be.

Enter the iPhone. With its custom applications and rich UI, many developers are surely thinking of making a replacement for the built in text messaging application; one that bypasses AT&T’s draconian text messaging fees. There is one problem. Right now, official iPhone applications that are created by developers cannot run in the background. Unfortunately, this stipulation cripples a text messaging replacement because unless the app is running, you won’t get notified that you have a message.

During WWDC, Apple created a resolution to this by allowing developers to a unified push notification service. This service will notify users when fresh data is available from an application that is not actively being used. These notifications will come in the form of counter badges, audio cues, and pop-up messages that look similar to text alerts.

With a background processing application, it’s easy to recreate the built in texting application while obviating the text messaging costs.

In October, Apple missed its self-imposed deadline for releasing this update to the iPhone but the update is surely coming and you can bet that developers will attempt to release a text messaging replacement and it would be a killer. Taking a look at the top paid applications on the App Store, most aren’t over $2.99. I could easily see a company releasing a text messaging replacement for $20. This may seem steep compared to the apps that are out there right now, but if you compare costs a $20 one-time fee is easily more affordable than $20 a month forever.

Of course the obvious questions are:

• Will Apple even allow a text messaging replacement app to be allowed into the App Store?
• If Apple allows an app, will Apple’s servers start crashing under the load of people moving away from the traditional text messaging applications?