They would rather be dead than be uncool! Yikes.
[1] Parental unit is a teacher at the same school? Yeah, your life will be miserable.
[2] Come from a different part of the area? You must be [insert various insults here] for 5 years.
[3] Scholarship kid at a private school? Good luck with that.
(p.s. this is actually a bit better than it used to be, everyone's a lot more comfortable doing a snap gc because it has most of the same features and the UX isn't dogshit like a mixed gc vs imessage.)
in 2050 kids will storm out because their pocket nuclear fusor isn't the trendiest. 'thanks moooom'
One day, someone will figure out how to become a "blue bubble" with an android, and that person will make a lot of money.
There have been a few attempts to make a cross-platform iMessage client (see: https://bluebubbles.app/), and they all require either genuine Mac hardware, or a virtual machine with spoofed serial numbers.
https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/mautrix-imessage
I use matrix bridges for all my chats (to Whatsapp, telegram and signal) so I could add iMessage too. But I don't have anyone in my friends or family that wants to use it.
and the more we push this culture-magnified story about teenagers, the more this will might approach actually being true. An awful lot of teenagers would much rather be uncool than dead, actually like their parents, don't find school terrible and so on. But for some reason, our culture has been spinning a yarn about them for decades now that both stands in opposition to the truth, and has simultaneously reshaped it.
imessage is specifically impactful because it doesn't exclude from individual communication as much as groups. you can still talk to your friends just fine but i remember being left off group texts because the experience is otherwise just so bad. can't add people can't react to stuff whatever.
what usually happens is there ends up being a second gc: 1 is ostensibly the "main one" with everyone in it and the unofficial second is with just blue bubbles. but communication usually ends up in the blue bubble one.
i will add it's not nearly so bad now, most people just do a snap gc but that wasn't the case e.g. 6 years ago.