My bet is it means “not installed by default”.

Communicator doesn’t provide access to addictive social media apps or games. Instead, the company partnered with the maker of an Android launcher, Niagara Launcher, to provide access to messaging apps and productivity tools like Gmail, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Slack.

Hopefully it can have the boot loader unlocked and a no google OS installed. Maybe.

I thing you could turn off certain notifications from the PC side.

I moved to Droidify, a fdroid client. Its got extra repos built in and feels more polished IMO.

You can also look into Obtanium to install APKs direct from GItHub. This generally means you get updates faster than fdroid, and are 100% sure no code had changed (fdroid rebuilds packahes and resigns them).