As with most other services and modules of functionality of the GSM system, no individual can claim to be the exclusive inventor of SMS. The idea of adding text messaging to the services of mobile users was latent in many communities of mobile communication services at the beginning of the 1980s. Experts from several of those communities contributed in the discussions on which should be the GSM services. Most thought of SMS as a means to alert the individual mobile user, e.g., an incoming voice mail, whereas others had more sophisticated applications in their minds, e.g. telemetry. However, few believed that SMS would be used as a means for sending text messages from one mobile user to another.

The first commercial SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992, from Neil Papworth of Sema Group (using a personal computer) to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone (using an Orbitel 901 handset). The text of the message was "Merry Christmas". The first SMS typed on a GSM phone is claimed to have been sent by Riku Pihkonen, an engineer student at Nokia, in 1993.

In 2000, just 17 billion SMS messages were sent; in 2001, the number was up to 250 billion, and 500 billion SMS messages in 2004. SMS is particularly popular in Europe, Asia (excluding Japan; see below), Australia and New Zealand. Popularity has grown to a sufficient extent that the term texting (used as a verb meaning the act of mobile phone users sending short messages back and forth) has entered the common lexicon. In China, SMS is very popular, and has brought service providers significant profit (18 billion short messages were sent in 2001). It is a very influential and powerful tool in the Philippines, where the average user sends 10-12 text messages a day. The Philippines alone sends on the average 400 million text messages a day, more than the annual average SMS volume of countries in Europe, and even China. SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores update, railway/airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS. In India, metropolitan media outlets often take real-time polls and audience opinion through SMS, via reserved 4-digit numbers that redirect the information to the respective aforementioned outlets based on designated prefix codes.

Short messages are particularly popular amongst young urbanites. In many markets, the service is comparatively cheap. For example, in Australia a message typically costs between AUD 0.20 and AUD 0.25 to send (some pre-paid services charge AUD 0.01 between their own phones), compared with a voice call, which costs somewhere between AUD 0.40 and AUD 2.00 per minute (commonly charged in half-minute blocks). Despite the low cost to the consumer, the service is enormously profitable to the service providers. At a typical length of only 190 bytes (incl. protocol overhead), more than 350 of these messages per minute can be transmitted at the same data rate as a usual voice call (9 kbit/s).

Real SMS freaks write a message within seconds. The Guinness Book of World records has a world record for text message, currently held by Ang Chuang Yang of Singapore. Ms. Ang keyed in the official text messaging sentence, as established by Guinness (“The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”), in 41.52 seconds.

But the time when SMSs where sent only via mobile phone are over. Fixed-line phones offer this feature as well: Siemens Gigaset SMS phones