Speculatively tying your pet peeve to a serious social problem is an old and tired framing trick. That way if people disagree with your pet peeve, you can retort with “oh, I guess you don’t care about teen suicide?”

It’s obvious and it does little to advance your cause, while trivializing the actual serious problem.

We’re not going to solve teen suicide with RCS.

Speculative tie-in? Google's claims are that Apple profits from peer pressure and bullying, I'm not sure but I would think that the people most bullied would be teens and then logically some would commit suicide because of it, I'm sure other bullying would be part of the bullying "package" if that appeases you.

It doesn't have to be RCS but Apple has made clear they don't want any interoperability, so that seems like bad faith.

> There is no doubt in my mind that lesser privileged kids get bullied when they get invited to an iPhone texting group and they instantly break all functionality with cheaper Android phones.

Sample size of one, but I asked my 13 y.o. daughter.

Me:

   This guy believes kids get bullied for having Android phones

Daughter:

   What guy

Me:

   Random guy
   
   As a kid, do people care about the blue vs green bubble thing?

Daughter:

   No
   
   Before I knew it happened when you texted an android i thought the green was special
   
   lol

Another data point. I'm from Spain, and the ones who are bullied here are the iPhone users. Vast majority of people are Android users, and iPhone users are seen as snobs. That's among the adults. Nobody here would hand over an iPhone to a kid. It's not hugely expensive, but it's expensive enough.

I'm glad your daughter does not think this way or hang around people who do. You've raised her right.

Thank you! She's a good kid.

Jesus that’s one helluva leap.

You think so? It might be a tad dramatic but teens interface with the world through their phones and this purposeless "otherization" can not be having a good effect on society.

A trad dramatic? Ha, it's incredibly dramatic. If it isn't green bubbles, it will be the wrong hair color, the wrong video game tastes, liking the wrong instructor, a million other stupid things. The correct solution is to exacerbate differences within students to the point that cliques are difficult to create due to less in common, and absolutely not attempt to create increased conformity.

Increasing conformity only further increases the obviousness of people's differences, no matter how slight. An extreme example would be Japan, which was so homogenous that discrimination by Blood Type is a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_personality_theory

My reply was not about the color, it is about breaking functionality. I think the color difference is fine.

It’s public schools. Kids will find other ways to bully each other no matter the communication method.