Google SMS channels

In 2008, mobile internet in India was a different world. Smartphones were not yet the default device. Data plans were expensive and unreliable. But SMS worked—cheaply, instantly, on every phone. The market for SMS-based content subscriptions had grown quietly into a real business: services like Mytoday and SMSGupshup had built meaningful user bases around delivering news, cricket scores, and jokes in 160 characters.

Then Google launched SMS Channels in India.

The service let anyone create a channel—a topic-based SMS subscription—and let users subscribe to receive updates directly to their phones. Simple, free for the end user, and backed by Google’s distribution reach and brand credibility.

When a company of that scale enters a niche market, the dynamics shift immediately. It’s not that Google’s product was dramatically superior. The subscription model, the 160-character format, the basic mechanics—all of it existed already. What Google brought was trust and ubiquity. Users who had never heard of SMSGupshup had definitely heard of Google. That asymmetry matters.

For mobile VAS providers at the time, this was the familiar pattern: a market develops, proves there’s demand, attracts a platform giant, and then the original players face a choice between competing on features, retreating to defensible niches, or getting absorbed.

I launched a channel for this blog on the platform—a small experiment in distribution. The idea that someone could subscribe and receive new posts as SMS updates felt genuinely novel for a technical blog. That novelty says something about how different the mobile landscape was then.

SMS Channels didn’t survive long as a Google product. It was eventually shut down, like many of Google’s experimental services from that era. But the underlying dynamic—incumbent mobile operators and VAS providers suddenly sharing space with a technology company that could afford to offer the same service for free—was a preview of patterns that would play out across many industries in the following decade.

The question worth asking then, and still worth asking now: when a platform enters your market, what do you actually own that they don’t?