The application determines what type of antennas will work.
Concentrating available power in the intended direction requires less power to make the communication link.
Sat phones, evolved from the Iridium system, use omnidirectional antennas for convinence of user. They sacrifice power consumption efficiency by doing so but intent was a small phone resembling a cellphone. The modern cell phones with internal antenna is also sacrificing battery power and battery life compared to old external antenna design. Internal antennas require more cell sites but evolution of needed capacity of mobilephone population made this an acceptable tradeoff. The first cellphone, the Motorola Dynatac (the Brick) used a very efficient half-wave external antenna, but would be unacceptable to most mobilephone users today.
The system overall design has to satisfy the overall link power budget to achieve the desired results.