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Many companies have claimed to have sent the very first text message, but according to a former employee of NASA, Edward Lantz, the first was sent via a simple Motorola beeper in 1989 by Raina Forteni from New York City to Melbourne Beach, Florida using upside down numbers that could be read as words and sounds. The first SMS typed on a GSM phone is claimed to have been sent by Riku Pihkonen, an engineer student at Nokia, in 1993.

Initial growth of text messaging was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month. One factor in the slow take-up of SMS was that operators were slow to set up charging systems, especially for prepaid subscribers, and eliminate billing fraud which was possible by changing SMSC settings on individual handsets to use the SMSCs of other operators. Over time, this issue was eliminated by switch-billing instead of billing at the SMSC and by new features within SMSCs to allow blocking of foreign mobile users sending messages through it. By the end of 2000, the average number of messages per user reached 35.

SMS was originally designed as part of GSM, but is now available on a wide range of networks, including 3G networks. However, not all text messaging systems use SMS, and some notable alternate implementations of the concept include J-Phone's "SkyMail" and NTT Docomo's "Short Mail", both in Japan. E-mail messaging from phones, as popularized by NTT Docomo's i-mode and the RIM BlackBerry, also typically use standard mail protocols such as SMTP over TCP/IP.

Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service, with 35% of all mobile phone users worldwide or 4.2 Million out of 7.3 Million phone subscribers at end of 2003 being active users of the Short Message Service. In countries like Finland, Sweden and Norway over 72% of the population use SMS. The European average is about 85% and North America is rapidly catching up with over 40% active users of SMS by end of 2006. The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone subscribers is in the Philippines with an average of 15 texts sent per day by subscriber. In Singapore the average is 12 and in South Korea 10.

Text messaging was reported to have addictive tendencies by the Global Messaging Survey by Nokia in 2001 and was confirmed to be addictive by the study at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 2004. Since then the study at the University of Queensland in Australia has found that text messaging is the most addictive digital service on mobile or internet, and is equivalent in addictiveness to cigarette smoking. The text reception habit introduces a need to remain connected, called "Reachability".

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