What astonishes me is how the mind of teens just cannot palpate the world they live in. Not to plagiarize Louis CK but even with an android flagship in their hands at 14, being cast away due to strange techno/market forces is enough to forget everything and suffer.

in 2050 kids will storm out because their pocket nuclear fusor isn't the trendiest. 'thanks moooom'

Generalizing here, but that sounds exactly like teenagers. No perspective, and under way too much pressure to conform.

And, on rare occasions, prone to hyperbole.

I was a profoundly uncool teenager and enjoyed life quite a bit. Buck the trend.

As a contrapuntal anecdata, I was profoundly uncool from primary[1] through teenage years[2][3] and was miserable for almost all of it.

[1] Parental unit is a teacher at the same school? Yeah, your life will be miserable.

[2] Come from a different part of the area? You must be [insert various insults here] for 5 years.

[3] Scholarship kid at a private school? Good luck with that.

it's not "pressure to conform" it's that you will end up gradually pushed out of friend gcs especially. it's not always intentional but there is 100% a certain amount of social isolation that usually results.

(p.s. this is actually a bit better than it used to be, everyone's a lot more comfortable doing a snap gc because it has most of the same features and the UX isn't dogshit like a mixed gc vs imessage.)

A lot of teenagers would rather be dead than uncool.

One day, someone will figure out how to become a "blue bubble" with an android, and that person will make a lot of money.

I'm sorry, but no they won't. They will make a small amount of money, and then will be sued into the ground by Apple if they ignore the mountain of cease and desist warnings they will get.

There have been a few attempts to make a cross-platform iMessage client (see: https://bluebubbles.app/), and they all require either genuine Mac hardware, or a virtual machine with spoofed serial numbers.

There already is a way but it does require an apple Mac or virtual machine:

https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/mautrix-imessage

I use matrix bridges for all my chats (to Whatsapp, telegram and signal) so I could add iMessage too. But I don't have anyone in my friends or family that wants to use it.

> A lot of teenagers would rather be dead than uncool.

and the more we push this culture-magnified story about teenagers, the more this will might approach actually being true. An awful lot of teenagers would much rather be uncool than dead, actually like their parents, don't find school terrible and so on. But for some reason, our culture has been spinning a yarn about them for decades now that both stands in opposition to the truth, and has simultaneously reshaped it.

from someone who is not too long outside of high school and so maybe remembers this better:

imessage is specifically impactful because it doesn't exclude from individual communication as much as groups. you can still talk to your friends just fine but i remember being left off group texts because the experience is otherwise just so bad. can't add people can't react to stuff whatever.

what usually happens is there ends up being a second gc: 1 is ostensibly the "main one" with everyone in it and the unofficial second is with just blue bubbles. but communication usually ends up in the blue bubble one.