The blue vs green bubble thing never really bothered me. As long as I can communicate with the person I'm talking to, I don't care how the messages are sent, unless maybe if I don't want a message to be sent over plain sms. It's ridiculous how it has become a status thing.
I'm in Germany, at least my designer colleagues love iMessage, but not for work. Since we know each other for a long time, there's lots of semi private messaging going around.
It's not just about the color of the bubble. If you go on an outing with a group of iPhone users, there's a high chance they'll create a group chat with and without you, because the group chat with you won't let them send HQ photos. Even if they aren't trying to be exclusionary, someone will inevitably forget to send messages to both group chats. iMessage incentivizes situations like this which socially punishes Android users.
I hear this a lot, I’ve not known a single person who has considered it a status thing. There are people who have cheap phones from both apple and android and they were made fun of for the price of the phone, not the bubble color. iMessage just made it much nicer to talk to people. “I can send messages over wifi!” made it so you could send messages in school or anywhere with a big metal roof. “The images are better!” These were limitations of the SMS standard that Apple designed around. Now? Yeah, there’s other options, but back then iMessage made its hold by being able to be used by people who couldn’t use SMS or didn’t want to for whatever reason
That's because you're looking at it from an adults perspective, if you go into a HS you'll see it (Source, used to be a substitute in a past life) and there have even been some articles on it that the whole blue/green bubble thing is targeting by Apple towards teens in HS rather than adults.