If apple is forced to shut down iMessage being the exclusive option and have some pure SMS application they might see a sudden noticeable drop in market share.
Nvidia has a very similar green man bad syndrome going on too. As the amount of time a HN discussion on Nvidia increases, the probability of mentioning that Linus said “fuck you nvidia” approaches 1, even though it’s irrelevant to a topic, or that he's a mercurial asshole who's said a whole lot of things.
The casual fanboyism disrupts all discourse on these topics because there’s a large minority of users who have adopted what PG describes as “hater-ism” and allowed it to dominate their thinking on a topic. Negative parasocial attachment is the same process as positive parasocial attachment and just as problematic, but largely never called out.
http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
In short: lotta fanboys on these topics who don't even realize they're fanboys/adopting fanboy frames, because they don't realize that anti-fanboys are still parasocially attached too. And we've casually accepted the low level of discourse on these topics, and it pollutes the whole discussion of a lot of interesting topics because of who's doing them.
"Okay well, now that we're launching an alternative to SMS, how will we distinguish iMessage messages from regular SMS messages?"
"Hm, well, SMS messages are green, so what if we picked another color?"
"Yeah okay, blue? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
"Sounds good, mock it up and send it to the engineers"
edit: The reason for picking green originally was probably because all the "communication"-related apps had a green color scheme, including Messages. This persists today — the app icons for Phone, Messages, and FaceTime are all green.
…the color isn’t the problem. It’s shorthand for the real underlying issues