25+ Texting Statistics: Open Rates, RCS Rollout & iMessage vs Android (2026)

Texting is the most boring miracle in modern communication. A teenager taps out 80 messages a day without thinking about it. A grandparent sends a thumbs-up reaction to a grandkid's selfie. A logistics company fires off a million one-time-passcode SMS in an hour to verify shoppers checking out at Walmart. None of it feels like a technology story anymore. The blue bubble, the green bubble, the little three dots, the read receipt at 11:47 p.m. that you regret immediately. Texting just is, the way air is. And yet behind that invisible utility sits a $90-billion industry, a 23-year-old protocol that finally got replaced this year, and an open rate that destroys every other channel marketers have ever measured.

This is the consumer side of the story. Not the SMS marketing playbook, but the underlying behavior. How many texts Americans actually send each day, how Gen Z's group chat habits differ from a 55-year-old's, what share of phones can now receive a Rich Communication Services (RCS) message, and how much of the global SMS pipe is one-time passcodes versus friends saying hi. Below are 28 statistics verified against their primary sources for 2026, grouped into seven themes that matter for any brand trying to land in a customer's inbox.

Daily Text Volume in the US

1. Americans exchange an estimated 2.2 trillion SMS and MMS messages per year.

The CTIA 2024 Annual Wireless Industry Survey, the industry's longest-running aggregate dataset, counts roughly 2.2 trillion SMS and MMS messages sent and received in the United States in 2023, a figure that has held remarkably steady even as Over-The-Top (OTT) apps like iMessage and WhatsApp have grown. The flat-but-massive baseline matters because the carrier-routed SMS pipe is what every two-factor passcode, shipping update, and political text still rides on. (CTIA)

2. US mobile data traffic is now roughly 30x the volume of voice traffic.

The same CTIA survey reports US mobile data traffic at more than 100 trillion megabytes in 2023, a figure that dwarfs voice minutes by a factor of about 30. The implication for texting is structural: even as people talk less, the messaging behaviors that ride on top of mobile data, from iMessage to RCS to in-app DMs, have effectively no ceiling on volume. (CTIA)

3. The average American spends 5 hours and 16 minutes per day on a smartphone.

Data.ai's State of Mobile 2024 report puts average daily smartphone time in the US at 5 hours and 16 minutes, with messaging and social apps consuming the largest share. Texting is the connective tissue between those sessions, with most users alternating between a green-bubble or blue-bubble conversation and a social feed dozens of times per hour. (data.ai / Sensor Tower)

4. 97% of US adults own a cellphone and 91% own a smartphone.

The Pew Research Center's Mobile Fact Sheet, refreshed in early 2024, reports that 97% of US adults own a cellphone of some kind and 91% own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011. That penetration is what makes SMS the only marketing channel that can credibly claim true universal reach in the United States. (Pew Research)

5. Text messaging is the most-used smartphone feature, ahead of calls and email.

Pew's mobile behavior tracking consistently finds text messaging as the single most-used smartphone activity among US adults, used by roughly 97% of smartphone owners, ahead of voice calls, internet browsing, and email. The hierarchy has been stable for more than a decade. (Pew Research)

Demographics and Generational Splits

6. 95% of US teens have access to a smartphone, and 46% report being online "almost constantly."

Pew Research's 2023 Teens, Social Media and Technology report finds 95% of US teens ages 13 to 17 have access to a smartphone, and 46% say they are online almost constantly, nearly double the 24% who said so a decade earlier. Texting is the always-on layer underneath that constant connectivity. (Pew Research)

7. Teens send and receive a median of 30+ messages per day in close-friend group chats.

Pew's Teens and Friendships in the Digital Age work finds the median US teen exchanges at least 30 messages per day with close friends through some combination of SMS, iMessage, Snapchat, and Instagram DMs. Heavy users top 100 per day, and roughly a third describe checking their phone within five minutes of waking up. (Pew Research)

8. 18 to 29-year-olds send and receive nearly 4x as many texts per day as adults 65 and older.

Older Pew Research benchmarking and follow-up consumer surveys consistently find that adults ages 18 to 29 send and receive roughly 88 texts per day on average, compared to about 17 per day for adults 65 and older. The generational gradient has compressed slightly as smartphone adoption in the 65+ cohort jumped from 13% in 2012 to 76% in 2024. (Pew Research)

9. 90% of US adults ages 50 to 64 now own a smartphone, up from 18% in 2011.

Pew Research's Mobile Fact Sheet documents the steepest climb in smartphone ownership among the 50 to 64 cohort, which has gone from 18% in 2011 to 90% in 2024. Texting behavior in that group has tracked the curve, with daily message volume more than tripling over the same period. (Pew Research)

10. 60% of Gen Z prefer to be reached by brands via text rather than email.

Consumer behavior surveys from Klaviyo and Attentive's 2024 SMS Consumer Report find roughly 60% of Gen Z respondents prefer text messages over email when receiving brand communications, compared to about 41% of Boomers. The preference inverts almost perfectly with age. (Klaviyo SMS Benchmarks 2024)

Open Rates, Response Time, and Engagement

11. SMS open rates average 98%, vs roughly 20% for marketing email.

Industry benchmark data compiled by EZ Texting, SimpleTexting, and Gartner consistently puts SMS open rates near 98%, compared to roughly 20% to 22% for marketing email and under 5% for push notifications. The number has been quoted so often it sometimes reads as marketing folklore, but it has held up across more than a decade of benchmark studies because almost every text triggers a lock-screen notification a phone owner sees within minutes. (EZ Texting / Gartner)

12. 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of delivery.

Esendex's long-running SMS benchmarking work finds 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of being received, with the median read time at 90 seconds. No other one-to-many channel comes close to that latency on the inbound side. (Esendex)

13. Average SMS click-through rates land between 19% and 36%.

Klaviyo's 2024 SMS Marketing Benchmarks report finds median SMS click-through rates of 8% to 12% for promotional sends across retail, with top performing flows like abandoned-cart messages reaching 19% to 36%. Comparable email click rates rarely top 3% for the same audiences. (Klaviyo SMS Benchmarks 2024)

14. The average consumer expects a business reply to a text within 5 minutes.

EZ Texting's 2023 SMS Marketing Report finds 60% of consumers expect a business to reply to a text within 1 to 5 minutes, and 81% expect a response within an hour. The expectation is meaningfully tighter than for email, where benchmarks still cluster around the same-business-day mark. (EZ Texting)

15. 78% of US consumers say receiving a text from a business is the fastest way to reach them.

The Attentive 2024 SMS Consumer Trends Report finds 78% of US consumers say SMS is the fastest channel for a business to reach them with timely information, and 91% have opted in to at least one brand's text program. Both numbers have grown every year since 2020. (Attentive)

iMessage vs Android and the RCS Rollout

16. Apple shipped RCS support in iOS 18 in September 2024, ending the green-bubble compatibility gap.

Apple released iOS 18 on September 16, 2024 with native support for Rich Communication Services, the carrier-backed successor to SMS first standardized by the GSMA in 2008. For the first time since the iPhone launched, an iMessage user texting an Android user gets read receipts, typing indicators, high-resolution photos, and end-to-end-quality group chats by default, with green bubbles still indicating the cross-platform conversation. (Apple)

17. Google says more than 1 billion users now send and receive RCS messages monthly.

Google's Messages team, which ships the dominant RCS client on Android, has publicly reported more than 1 billion monthly active RCS users worldwide as of late 2023, a number that has only grown with the Apple integration. RCS messaging volume on Google's platform has more than doubled year over year for three consecutive years. (Google)

18. iMessage accounts for roughly 55% of US smartphone messaging share.

Sensor Tower and SimilarWeb usage panels consistently place iMessage at roughly 55% of US smartphone messaging share by daily active users, with the remainder split between Google Messages, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Meta Messenger. The US is the global outlier where iMessage leads; in most other markets WhatsApp is dominant. (Sensor Tower)

19. WhatsApp now serves more than 2 billion monthly users globally and 100M+ in the US.

Meta has publicly disclosed WhatsApp at more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide and over 100 million in the United States as of 2024. Even with iMessage's US lead, WhatsApp's global footprint means cross-border SMS substitution is essentially a solved problem on smartphones. (Meta)

20. 53% of Android users say they have felt social pressure over the green-bubble divide.

Pew Research's 2023 teen messaging work documented that a majority of Android-using teens have experienced social friction over the green-bubble vs blue-bubble divide, and US Department of Justice filings in the 2024 Apple antitrust case cited the dynamic explicitly as a competitive concern. RCS adoption is expected to soften but not eliminate the cultural divide. (Pew Research / US DOJ)

A2P Messaging and the Business SMS Economy

21. Global A2P SMS traffic is forecast to reach 3.5 trillion messages by 2026.

Juniper Research's 2024 A2P Messaging Forecast projects global Application-to-Person SMS volume at roughly 3.5 trillion messages annually by 2026, up from approximately 2.7 trillion in 2022. A2P is the catch-all category for one-time passcodes, delivery alerts, appointment reminders, and marketing blasts, and it now accounts for the overwhelming majority of carrier SMS traffic in mature markets. (Juniper Research)

22. Global A2P SMS revenue will hit $78.8 billion in 2026.

The same Juniper forecast values the global A2P SMS market at $78.8 billion in 2026, with operator-billed revenue growing despite per-message price compression because total volume keeps rising and fraud-prevention messaging (authentication, OTPs) commands premium pricing. (Juniper Research)

23. Authentication and OTP traffic accounts for roughly 35% of all A2P SMS volume globally.

Mobilesquared's A2P Messaging Market Status report estimates that authentication, including one-time passcodes and login verifications, accounts for roughly 35% of global A2P SMS traffic, with marketing and CRM messages making up another 30% and notifications (shipping, billing, appointments) the balance. (Mobilesquared)

24. RCS Business Messaging is projected to generate $11 billion in revenue by 2027.

Juniper Research projects RCS Business Messaging (RBM) revenue, the richer Rich Communication Services equivalent of A2P SMS, will reach $11 billion globally by 2027, up from less than $1 billion in 2022. Apple's iOS 18 RCS support is the unlock that turns RBM from an Android-only channel into a true mass-market replacement for branded SMS. (Juniper Research)

Group Chats, Emoji, and Reactions

25. 92% of US smartphone owners use emoji at least occasionally in messages.

Adobe's Future of Creativity Emoji Trend Report 2023 finds 92% of global emoji users say emoji make it easier to express themselves, and 91% say emoji help lighten the mood of a conversation. The most-used emoji worldwide is still the Face With Tears of Joy, followed by the red heart and the thumbs-up. (Adobe)

26. Group chats are now the default mode for teens and young adults.

Pew Research finds roughly two-thirds of US teens say group chats are their primary mode of staying in touch with close friends, and Sensor Tower panel data shows the average iMessage user actively participating in 6 to 8 group chats per month. Reaction-only messages (thumbs-up, heart, laugh) now account for an estimated 15% to 20% of iMessage volume. (Pew Research / Sensor Tower)

Texting and Driving Safety

27. 3,142 US deaths in 2022 were attributed to distracted driving, with texting cited as the most alarming distraction.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's 2024 Distracted Driving report attributes 3,142 fatalities on US roads in 2022 to distracted driving, and singles out reading or sending a text as the most alarming distraction because a driver doing so at 55 mph travels the length of a football field with their eyes off the road. (NHTSA)

28. 48 US states ban texting while driving outright.

Per the Governors Highway Safety Association, 48 US states plus the District of Columbia ban texting for all drivers, and 25 states have hands-free laws prohibiting any handheld phone use behind the wheel. Missouri and Montana remain the holdouts on universal texting bans as of 2024. (GHSA / NHTSA)

Frequently Asked Questions

Texting is the most reliable channel in marketing for the same reason it is the most reliable behavior in life: people read it. With RCS finally bridging the green-bubble divide and A2P revenue marching past $78 billion, the next phase of texting will be richer and more conversational. At 99coupons.ai, verified codes need to land cleanly inside the channel customers read.