I don’t really see the issue. Minimalism is a sliding scale.

Just because the design goal was for it to be more minimalist than a typical Android/iOS phone doesn’t mean they have to go full-on “NO. It’s only for phonecalls and maybe SMS!”

Playing music isn’t particularly “maximalist”, and WhatsApp certainly isn’t (people in the US need to understand that WhatsApp is basically SMS for most of the world). Maybe maps is, but it’s optional anyway so who cares

Even in USA nobody ever SMS me. Messenger is primary with WhatsApp and signal sometimes being relevant and wechat for the Chinese community.

Crazy, most people use SMS with Messenger as the go to for big groups for me (in USA). No one I know uses WhatsApp

Seems weird to me to use an unencrypted ancient format

Unencrypted is not the thing that bothers me - after all, Telegram is so popular, so not like most people even care. What bothers me is that you still need to pay for each one! You have to edit the texts to fit into a tiny arbitrary character restriction or else you’s be charged for a second message! Why is data do relatively cheap, but those messages are still overpriced?