If you’re in any iMessage-only group chats, you can’t really switch to Android. Apple will just silently fail to deliver any further messages to you if you try to shut down your iMessage account.

You’d have to coach each person (individually) in all of those threads to delete the thread and create a new one in order to be included again, which is a crazy barrier. Even more so if the threads are work related.

I suspect Apple is in violation of federal law in this: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511