I feel like these devices are too annoying. For example, I dissabled notifications for almost all apps, but a couple of updates later, and the notifications are back (even though the setting is still dissabled), and I feel like when these apps are developed, they want to bundle critical notifications with non-critial ones (ie. Do you want a notification when someone breaks into your house AND when our sales team wants to upsell you something? Or neither?). Then there’s the data privacy aspect.
The issue is that these friends aren’t in the same continent as I am. Online chat is the only way we can chat and the rest of the world (unfortunately) use WhatsApp. I have maybe 2 friends who use sms who are in the states.