I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
Signal is my preferred messenger right now since I convinced my contacts to move to it. Collects the least and it is private.
There is also Session which is a Signal fork that removes phone number linking.
Matrix for a privacy focused federated messaging system is another option.
My family members all moved over to Matrix about a year ago. It’s been great so far. I also use Signal quite a bit.