Telephones and asynchronous communication have very different use cases. There are many situations where asynchronous is much better, but when some complexity c

Telephones and asynchronous communication have very different use cases. There are many situations where asynchronous is much better, but when some complexity comes in and would require lots of exchanges, a phone call is much more effective. I often picked up the phone and called someone after exchanging several messages (e-mails, text messages or anything else), solving the issue MUCH faster than if it would have been by message exchange. Most people also can speak much faster than they type. Of course, there are problems with the phone system itself (let's just mention robocalls), but it's just a matter of time before you'll get robomessages on any kind of messaging platform too, although maybe they will be easier to filter out. Robocalls do happen on phone because that's the platform where most people are reachable (and because it's easily doable on scale). And there are problems with call centers having completely incompetent people answering. But this doesn't mean that the problem is inherent to the phone... Finally, phone is one of the few really interoperable telecommunication systems (like e-mail is, but mobile messaging platforms like Whatsapp/Signal/... are NOT, at least not until the EU will oblige them to, which is planned). Imagine if you could only receive calls from people using the same phone brand as you, or anything similar...