I still feel like my point is being lost. A generic contact identifier that you’re only going to show to other humans can of course be a string. People can put

I still feel like my point is being lost. A generic contact identifier that you’re only going to show to other humans can of course be a string. People can put whatever they want in there. But it won’t be useful for automation or other kinds of processing. If you’re going to actually use the number in any kind of automation, including tel: urls, it’s better as an integer because then you’re forced to process the incoming number properly before you put it in the database. In terms of E164, You’re not ever going to store numbers like 911 in a database of phone numbers that you’ll plug into automations. The whole point of E164 is to normalise the international numbering system. Why would you not use the international telecommunications standard for numbering, to store telephone numbers that are intended to be used to contact people? It’s the same as storing an IP address as a string. Sure, you can do it, but why? The only possible outcome is that you will eventually store useless strings that aren’t actually valid. Of course the tel: url scheme can support E164 numbers. I mean unless your app is limited to only a single geography, why would you even want it to be local only?