I don't know enough here to know if this is true, so I'd love if people with better knowledge of the phone industry could comment on my theory here. Phone usag

I don't know enough here to know if this is true, so I'd love if people with better knowledge of the phone industry could comment on my theory here. Phone usage in general has gone down for many use cases. Obviously there is a lot more competition here from async communication methods (like texting, especially group texting is hard to replicate on the phone). For actual live conversations, I know my family has switched over to zoom and facetime. So we know that some of the reduced phone usage is due to other means of communicating being better in various contexts. But, I also believe that it's partly due to phone companies allowing for robocalls and other spam calls coming through. I've completely disabled receiving calls due to the junk calls I get. Something on the order of 3-4 a day compare to 0 useful calls. It's my belief that the phone companies have encouraged this either by selling subscriber data, or by not actively trying to fight/stop it. It seems like they've killed off their own core business and actively encourage people to use alternative means of communication. I think there's a lesson here about focusing too much on creating new revenue streams that come at the cost of the primary business. I think this happens in many businesses, but it seems like a warning to anyone operating a company and trying to increase revenue, not by providing better features to their core product, but instead scavenging their existing business. For the phone companies, maybe the phone is dying as a communication method, but it definitely seems like they are actively causing that to happen faster by not protecting it. Edit: of course, the phone companies are now really just network providers, but that does seem like a narrowing of their market.