iMessage lock in is a huge thing. When it was new and was still e2ee I ended up buying iPhones for everyone I regularly messaged.

These days it is insecure however because they backdoored the e2ee and kept it backdoored for the FBI, so now Signal is the only messenger I am reachable on.

Blue bubble snobbery is presently a mark of ignorance more than anything else.

I agree that it’s stupid to judge people for it, but you do have to admit that especially with not all people having RCS, the feature set of SMS and MMS that you have to deal with when not using iMessage is pretty barbaric. From the potato-quality videos (ironically, I recall QuickTime was heavily involved in that spec, lol) to the asinine way Apple lets you apply a reaction and then sends it as a verbose text… From an iPhone user’s point of view, a “green bubble” means “this conversation will work like it’s 2003.”

Yes, I know 99.999% of Android users are on WhatsApp (or WeChat, Line, or Telegram depending on cultural background) but at least half of iPhone users aren’t on those, so we still have to keep using Messages for a lot of people.