My girlfriend is an Apple nut (she even asked for airpods for her birthday, now that I've listened to her use them for a two way conversation I can safely say they're garbage) and she tolerates me not only not having an iPhone but even using cheogram for all my MMS. We just use other protocols for chatting more than the protocols "messages" supports.

She even gave me one of her old iPhones to try to convert me but I wasn't impressed and eventually she dropped it. Would iMessage help if you're single? Maybe the same amount having some fancy shoes would but IMO it's really a surface level thing.

Texting androids from an iPhone is a legitimately bad experience. No clue why iPhone users don't just get whats app, but if they're not willing to it's not surprising that they're uninterested in having text conversations with androids.

Competitive ... dating ... market? Have you considered hanging out with more, uh, human people?

I'm not exactly a playboy, but I've really never had this problem at all in my life. For what it's worth, approximately half of the women I speak to (in my subjective experience, eminently normal people) use Android phones.

*straight dating market

This is not at all a thing among the queer people I know. Most of my partners have Androids (one has an iPhone) and we all use Signal or Discord.