Oh no! I can see how this is a hassle to maintain though; just for example, my Huawei consistently resets the default sms app to the crappy stock one every tim

Oh no! I can see how this is a hassle to maintain though; just for example, my Huawei consistently resets the default sms app to the crappy stock one every time I use their "ultra battery saver mode" (which I otherwise like a lot) even though I explicitly included signal in the list of apps that are allowed to run in that mode. So I can see how the ecosystem makes this an annoying feature...