Completely not a thing in the UK. The app is a portal for SMS based auth and that's it. Everyone uses WhatsApp or other social network based messengers.

Australia / Asia too, no one cares about iMessage

Same in Germany. Everybody used WhatsApp

I know virtually nobody using iMessage in southern Europe.

I have lived in Brazil, Australia, Spain, and France. iMessage was never a thing in these markets.

RCS messages are also still going to show up in green bubbles as far as I know.

they are. the intentionally-low-contrast tone of green that Apple passive aggressively punishes Android users with.

I mean prior to iMessage existing, all messages sent in the "Text" app were green bubbles.

They weren't bright green with white text lmao https://cdn.redmondpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Messag...

End to end encryption is a reasonable justification for a visual indicator.

Originally it was because iMessages were free, while SMS were $0.15-$0.20 each. So glad Apple broke that monopoly, along with many other anti-consumer wireless provider restrictions.

Did Apple really break that monopoly? WhatsApp was released 2009 with the explicit pitch that it was "free SMS". iMessage launched 2011, and with the anti-consumer Apple lock-in, and isn't even much used outside US.

Also free/unlimited SMS was prevalent in many countries before WhatsApp or iMessage. And there were plenty of IMs before that too.

RCS is a new green? If you’re referring to the existing SMS green, that was Apple’s original color for messaging. They adopted blue to represent the transition to iMessage. So you can’t say they picked a poor color on purpose; it was representing their own product originally before they even came up with iMessage.

No, the original green was darker and less hard to read messages on. With iOS 7 they made it super bright.

Good point. The new green was decided after the split with iMessage, so technically Apple could have made it a poor color on purpose.

I still doubt it, especially since it’s the same green for FaceTime, Phone, and the icon that still represents iMessage.

Yeah, it wasn't always a bad green. They absolutely chose a bad color on purpose - arguably the world's best design company accidentally uses a painful high-saturation low-contrast background color that violates their own design guidelines for like 8 years by mistake? Give me a break.

Is having your message be a different colour really a punishment?

America matters more than the rest of the world. Everyone wants to come here, not the other way around.

This is irrelevant to Apple, still 10% of all customers

That 10% of the customers pays a lot more per customer than most do. We are likely responsible for far, FAR more than 10% of the revenue or 10% of the profit of apple.

did you miss the /s from your post?

Anecdotal evidence from Germany: Nobody uses iMessage. Everybody uses WhatsApp. Everbody!

I'm a US iphone user and I had no idea what iMessage colors meant until journalists started making a big deal of it. Not that I doubt the stories about green-shaming, it just never occurred to me.