This and group names are the absolute killers.
It's tough. My understanding is that SMS is at fault under the surface, requiring that images and videos be compressed to fit a size limit (right?).
My preferred solution would be mandated adversarial interoperability.
Absent that, I wish android could bundle images into a dead simple hosting site that send me a link to all the images, at max resolution, displayed with zero chrome whatsoever, in a browser window. Then I can download them like normal assets (with my press-and-hold browser utils. no third party UI).
Receiving photos packaged in a google library, for example, is a nightmare.
I would not be particularly happy to find out that someone I was messaging on an Android phone could easily just send up any images I send them to a public site.
(Already not happy with Google having data about me that I do not consent to thanks to people with Android phones)
As far as Google having data... I'm not clear how what OP proposed would give them any more data than they currently have.
There may have been a misunderstanding here.
I was referring to an android phone sending me (on iPhone) hosted images as a fallback rather then sending them via MMS (lossy) or google photos (bloated).
I don't know the details of the MMS spec, but I know the mms picture quality improved when I switched carriers several years ago.
The point I want to make is that Messages is not preventing them from including Android users because they don't have an iPhone, which is a general misunderstanding that I often observe when talking with Android users who use Whatsapp or similar and is also recurring here. If the Android user gets locked out, it's because a human decided to, not because Messages refused to include that user based on ecosystem lock-in (unlike Whatsapp).
However, like Twitter OP, I can testify that teens attach a lot more weight to the blue/green than they should. But then again, it's everywhere in popular culture. Try finding a recent hit movie/TV series or music video, produced in the US, that shows green bubbles (or Android for that matter, even though it has a higher market share).
Have you looked at parental controls for carriers? Chats with green messages are in the log, chats with blue messages are not.
Depending how much they like their parents reading their messages, maybe teens aren’t attaching enough weight.
I imagine they get paid for using blue bubbles, just like other product placements.
That is a feature. Also no "seen" privacy violators.
In iMessage, the "seen" notis (read receipts) are set on the reader side. They're totally customizable and can be globally disabled.
I have them on personally, because I find that it encourages good reply etiquette on my part, but they're easy to turn off in a granular way. chat-by-chat, whenever you want.
I'm not sure how this works for IG, others. I believe in whatsapp you can turn them off at the expense of losing that info for everyone else, but I'm not 100% on that.
The feature is extraordinarily useful in group chats. If you're trying to change venues while coordinating a group activity with people that haven't arrived, you get a realtime picture of who has up-to-date information and who doesn't. Makes a big difference.