Here in Japan, you'd use the traditional phone service for those things. For normal people, those are all extremely rare events. I'm not the one who suggested

Here in Japan, you'd use the traditional phone service for those things. For normal people, those are all extremely rare events. I'm not the one who suggested eliminating the caller app altogether, I'm just pointing out that I wouldn't miss it too much if it was gone. Your prior examples were about "loved ones" and parents, and outside the US/Canada, people don't generally use traditional voice calling (or SMS texting) for those people, or really anyone inside their personal circle. Also, we don't have Uber/Lyft here. Taxi services have their own apps (Go is the big one), and you'd use those. (Actually, we do have Uber, but I've never heard of anyone using it, and it seems to just connect riders with taxis anyway, unlike the "ride sharing" thing it does in the US.) But again, for most people, using these is rare: public transit is far cheaper, and taxis are generally expensive. I haven't used Uber/Lyft in a long time (since I was in the US), so I don't remember, but I'm surprised they don't have a voice-calling function built-in so drivers and customers aren't exposed to each others' phone numbers, as this seems like a security risk. And this is Japan, which is generally a rather conservative country that still hangs onto a lot of old tech and practices (a lot of businesses still use faxes, crazily enough). But even here, absolutely no one uses traditional SMS or phone calling for their friends/family: they all use LINE. And making restaurant reservations using websites is very common (there are some behind-the-times places that don't support this though), something I never saw in the US.