Mobile carriers should be afraid. Very afraid. The reason? Because free mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp, MessageMe, WeChat, Kik and Viber are slowly but surely eating away their profits, overtaking SMS’s in their popularity for the first time last year, according to fresh data from telecom and media consultancy firm Informa.

Now this trend probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to those who haven’t been living in a cave for the last three years. Recently, we heard that Nokia is even going as far as to include a dedicated WhatsApp button on its phones. Nevertheless, the news will come as a big blow to carriers, for which SMS’s have traditionally been a humongous cash cow, raking in annual profits of $115 billion over the last 12 months alone.

Chat Apps: The Death of SMS?

Informa compiled its data for the Financial Times, and its findings show that apps like the ones mentioned above – together with similar services like Blackberry’s Messenger, Apple’s iMessage and Samsung’s ChatON – have finally overtaken SMS’s as our favorite way of sending text messages.

According to them, mobile messaging apps accounted for about 19 billion text messages sent each and every day, compared to just 17.6 billion SMS messages. Moreover, chat app messages are expected to double to more than 41 billion a day by the end of this year.

Curiously though, SMS messaging is also set to keep growing over the same period. Informa predicts that the number of traditional text messages sent will rise to something like 21 billion a day, meaning its far too early to speak of the SMS’s demise just yet.

The humble SMS will die eventually, but its death is almost certainly going to be a slow and lingering one. Until the majority of the people in the world replace their old ‘mobile’ phones with smartphones, we’d better refrain from dancing on the grave of the SMS just yet.