I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
It is in fact, a US vs Europe thing. Stateside “SMS” is ubiquitous. I put quotes because it’s not really SMS anymore. It’s either RCS between Android users or iMessage between iPhone users. The only time SMS actually gets used is between Androids and iPhones, because as other commenters in this thread mention. Apple refuses to implement RCS on their devices in a way that is compatible with non-Apple devices.
I think it’s important to note that “RCS” in this context actually refers to a proprietary messaging platform by Google, running on Google’s servers. There is no industry-standard RCS in use in America; it’s just Google’s forked version, which in practice is exactly as proprietary as iMessage. Nobody should expect Apple to implement someone else’s proprietary messaging platform on their devices, especially one run by Google, which has the worst history of managing messaging platforms of any company on the planet.