The problem is not everyone can text you. For example, I get missed calls from school, from my dentist office or from government agency. They don't text me back

The problem is not everyone can text you. For example, I get missed calls from school, from my dentist office or from government agency. They don't text me back when I am offline. I hate calling strangers back. I don't like listening to my voicemail either but it is still essential in today's communication. Just as not everyone has text enabled. But when the person is not available, I at least know he or she has voicemail enabled or not. Plus, I hate typing on my phone. It takes so much effort. My big hands never play nice with screen keyboard, whereas over voice I can just spill the words in 10 seconds. > Just to hear white noise because you didn't hang up immediately after the voicemail started. I don't know how often this happen but I think in general people nowadays either hang up immediately or the chance of plain white noise is pretty low. Some of my friends are SMS users, some are twitter, some are FB, some are imessage. There is a big fragmentation and this is why a lot of chat app try to integrate with your native SMS (for example, FB Messenger). Or you get notification and reply over SMS (FB, Twitter)