Yes but it doesn’t brand the other person, the colour is to inform the sender that the message they sent is either an iMessage (blue) or an SMS (green).
It wasn’t intended to be some class system. When the iPhone launched, it only supported SMS and all texts were green. They wanted to differentiate iMessage conversations when they launched that a few years later, but still use the same client so people were more likely to use it. That way you know you can use more features but you also know you need a data connection. This was an important distinction when most people still had plans that had minutes, quantities of texts, and limited or no data. Also if a iMessage fails, it automatically uses SMS fallback. It’s important to know when that happens too. Colour was just a very obvious way to indicate that.
The reason iPhone users don’t like green bubble conversations now is mostly because SMS just doesn’t support all the iMessage features like higher quality pictures, video, tapback, inline reply, stickers, etc. It also is lowest common denominator for a group thread, so one person without iMessage causes the whole thread to revert to SMS.
You have fallen for the actual lies. iMessage doesn’t have higher quality video or images, it trashes the quality of MMS for no reason. Have a green bubble friend send you the exact same image on imessage and email it to you/send it on discord/whatever. It destroys the quality. Any other messaging app or even the default messages app on most phones won’t degrade quality like this, even on cell data; it’s being artificially degraded to make you believe iMessage has something other messaging apps don’t. There is no magical picture beautifier in imessage.
You quite literally have to turn off the “fuck up my videos and images” setting to even get decent video from other imessage users.
It absolutely does have higher quality video & photos than MMS. MMS does not have a clear public spec, and carriers/phones/OSes apply size limits for videos and pictures, and these limits are inconsistent at best. They are all quite low though, here is an Android Police article discussing it: https://www.androidpolice.com/why-text-message-videos-look-blurry-how-to-fix/
It’s not entirely dissimilar to email. It’s a bad idea to send an attachment over 15-20MB not because email can’t handle it, but because at some point in the chain something might have a limit that says that’s too much.
You are correct though that Apple does just crank it down to shit 3GPP level (I assume the baseline of the spec) and call it a day because they don’t care about SMS/MMS. Why would they, even Android users all use WhatsApp so it barely matters.
Obviously there is no “picture beautifier”, whatever the hell that means. I never said or implied that. iMessage movies & pictures are just less compressed than MMS ones, even between non-Apple MMS devices. Is it less compression than other over-the-top messaging apps? Depends on the app, but nowadays probably not.
MMS video file size has a default limit set by your provider. However, basically every phone has RCS available by default these days - which will be used in these cases automatically, within the same messages app - except when Apple refuses to allow it because of cross platform interaction.
You stated that iMessage provided this benefit, and it doesn’t; it isolates this benefit from being used. “Depends on the app” is just false. It’s “depends on the hardware” - google messages even recently expanded RCS support to phones that didn’t support it for one reason or another it in April. These data limitations haven’t been saving people from issues for over a decade, you’re conveying outdated takes.
