In the end, I think the social rejection isn’t Apple to blame for. We don’t blame clothing brands for enabling kids to discern who wears ‘the real thing’ and who hasn’t, either.

Or do we want to blame Apple for trying to improve SMS for their users without going through a lengthy standards process? They were a small player at the time in the phone market, so they couldn’t expect an iPhone-only solution to succeed, and writing an app wasn’t really a thing yet, so they couldn’t have gone the route WhatsApp later took, so what could they have done instead?

The colors are UI to indicate to their users who has access to the improvements and who hasn’t. If Apple didn’t indicate in any way that some people have different features available to them, I think people would blame them for that.

Also, US (AFAIK, this is a US thing) kids likely would still learn who could and could not use the features Apple added to SMS.