Send messages with smartphone

Would you like to send a message about the weekend or an interesting news article? We can send messages in all kinds of ways via the smartphone. For example via SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Telegram. Read more about the different apps below.

Every smartphone has an app for texting. This was even possible with the first mobile phones, which had no internet. It therefore does not matter whether you have a subscription with internet. Via SMS you send a text message to someone whose phone number you have. This can be found in the contact list or you can enter the recipient’s 06 number. Text messages are sent and received through the carrier’s network. The SMS costs depend on your subscription; usually text messages are settled within the bundle. If you exceed your bundle, you have to pay extra.

WhatsApp is the most popular app on smartphones to send and receive messages. The messages contain text, photos, videos, sound recordings and/or gifs. You can only start a conversation when the person has WhatsApp and is saved on your phone. But it is possible to receive a message from someone who is not in the contact list. Of course you can block them if necessary.

WhatsApp works over the phone’s internet connection. Anyone who uses WhatsApp indoors or elsewhere via WiFi does not pay anything extra because internet via WiFi has already been paid for. Outside the home on mobile internet, the costs are included in the internet bundle of your subscription.

iMessage is Apple’s SMS service. The sender and receiver must both have an iPhone for this. As soon as someone sends a text message from an iPhone to someone else with an iPhone, this goes through iMessage. This happens automatically. So you don’t need to activate anything. At the top of the screen, ‘iMessage’ appears in the relevant message, to distinguish it from a normal text message. The message clouds of iMessage are blue, in normal text messages they are green. iMessage works via the internet connection on the smartphone. If no internet connection is active, the message will be sent as a regular text message.

Messenger is an app of the social network Facebook. Only Facebook users can chat through the app. In addition, they must also want the app to be on their phone if they do this via the smartphone. You will immediately see messages from Facebook friends. But from people you are not friends with on Facebook, the messages appear in a different place in the Messenger app. Of course you can just block annoying people.

Telegram and Signal are alternatives to WhatsApp. You send and receive messages from contacts who also have the relevant app on their phone. This is done via the internet connection. Telegram and Signal are committed to privacy. They store less information from users than WhatsApp. The downside is that not many people use Telegram or Signal.