You probably know this already but just in case: you need to deregister iMessage explicitly and can do this online even without the device https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage

If your “friends” stop communicating with you and stop inviting you to group events just because of the brand of mobile phone you use, then I have some bad news for you: they might not really be friends.

Or they need to de-register with iMessage (because of course, how could you not have known?!?).

Apple is the company that gates iMessage because if they don't, in Craig Federighi's words, they are "[removing an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones".

I also cringe at the corporate speak of "iPhone families". "We're an iPhone family". What?

That's as stupid as saying that anyone that doesn't have you added on Facebook doesn't care about you. Sometimes technology erects pointless barriers with the intent of making people FOMO. This is like Social Media 101 right here, people 10 years ago had this figured out.

People say these things and I just have no idea how its possible. You can text android phones. Yes the bubble will be green. No, no one past middle school cares about the color of the bubble.

For one-to-one messages, SMS is mostly OK. Group chat via MMS is a bad experience. Group chat via internet-based chat like iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc... is a good experience.

Now the obvious solution is for the group to pick a cross-platform chat app and use that, but it's weirdly difficult to get a group of people to do that. Sometimes they would rather exclude someone from the group than switch apps, which might suggest that the excluded person needs better friends.

> No, no one past middle school cares about the color of the bubble.

This is just objectively not true. The nature of green vs blue messages feeds into the in-group out-group dynamics that humans (children and adults alike) are prone to.

This is by design. This works well for apple.