@xlillianx Thanks for the TED Talk. I stayed until the end and didn’t click over to another topic. 
In all seriousness, thank you for taking the time to explain not only how you use your Mudita Kompakt, but also the philosophy that led you to it. Your distinction between technology as an extension of ourselves and technology as a tool is particularly interesting. This is exactly the point we were making at IFA Berlin this year.
It also sounds like you approached the purchase with a clear understanding of what you wanted from the device, what you were willing to adjust, and which limitations were actually part of the appeal. This is great because sometimes we do hear about people expecting the phone to change their life without experiencing any friction. Those cases are the toughest for me, personally.
We’re glad Mudita Kompakt has found a place in that setup, and that Offline+, local music, offline maps, the headphone jack, and the lack of a front-facing camera are serving you well. It’s also wonderful to see community-created tools & apps are becoming part of your everyday experience (I love many of them too). Our developer community continues to impress all of us at Mudita. 
That said, receiving messages from only two iPhone users and having group conversations work sporadically is not something we would simply dismiss as “desirable difficulty.” You have already taken two important steps by deregistering your number from iMessage and turning off RCS, but there may still be several factors involved, including carrier provisioning, APN or MMS settings, mobile data access, or old conversation threads that remain associated with iMessage or RCS.
Even if texting is not currently high on your priority list, we would encourage you to contact our Customer Support team and provide logs so they can investigate what is happening behind the scenes. “If it’s important, they’ll call” is certainly one way to reclaim some peace, but we would still like your phone to receive the messages that it’s supposed to receive. 
Please also mention the earpiece volume when contacting them, particularly given your hearing needs. You may also want to try Volume+, which is a utility that was created by our very own @chadp
As for the broader characterization of Mudita, we understand why you see a lifestyle dimension to what we do. Mindfulness and intentional living are central to our work. At the same time, we do develop hardware and software, so we also recognize the responsibility that comes with being a technology company. The early experience was not as polished as it should have been for some users, and we understand why that left people feeling frustrated. Community developers have added tremendous value to Mudita Kompakt, but that doen;t remove our responsibility to continue improving the core device and operating system.
Please do create separate topics about OS-level age verification and the changing Android APK ecosystem. Both deserve focused conversations, and we would be interested to hear the communities perspective.
Thanks again for joining the forum, for supporting the community developers whose work you use, and for giving Mudita Kompakt such a thoughtful evaluation. We hope it continues to be the useful, deliberately limited tool you were looking for, right up until the day you finally manage to use it as a hammer. Although, for the record, we strongly recommend keeping the Sonim for that.