Apple had blue bubbles before Android was out the door, and Google thought they'd make their own mark by using green. The rest is history.

Before iMessage, all text bubbles were green. For the original concept of iPhone, anything telephonic (that your carrier could charge you for, since Steve Jobs ensured that iPhones got unlimited data at first) was colored green. That’s why, to this day, the phone app and the messages app are both green, as well as the “you’re on a call” status that appears behind the clock.

Then iMessage came out in iOS 5 and they made it blue, the color of things that used data (like safari, stocks, mail, App Store, weather)

It wasn’t until the redesign of iOS 7 that they cranked up the saturation of all the colors, and the telephony green became like, anxiety-inducing electric green. I feel like that’s when people started hating these green bubbles so much, because iOS 7 actually made them an ugly, radioactive color. Where the blue remained a pleasant, calm ocean blue.

I actually kind of prefer the aesthetic of the green bubbles, despite being conditioned to look at it unfavorable.

Exactly. The color doesn’t bother me, but some of the features do. Group chats, read receipts, iMessage games/game pigeon, photo quality are all non-existent or janky between iPhone and Android.

As someone that switched to Android, I would even take needing to own an Apple device first before you could log into iMessage

Unless it's built into the default app people probably aren't going to use it.