I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but in South Africa basically everyone uses WhatsApp, because SMS isn’t free and most contracts don’t include unlimited SMS’s. Whatsapp just made sense. There’s a few of us that switched to Telegram when the whole WhatsApp privacy policy conundrum came up a while ago, but most people still use WhatsApp as their main form of communication in SA. Even the Telegram guys mostly still have WhatsApp.
Telegram in the US has a tainted reputation for being the app of choice for coordinating far right groups, and for politicians trying to subvert open meetings and public records laws. The “Proud Boys” used it to coordinate the January 6th insurrection on the US Capitol. WhatsApp is more common in the US, I think, but my perception is that it is best known among Americans with strong ties to Europe/Europeans.