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.
Once upon a time, the ISPs would send you a modem and you had to buy a router separately. And then even for a while, they'd include a modem/wireless router combo, but it often sucked and a lot of people would buy a separate router anyway.
Nowadays? The ISPs are giving you free wireless routers that do everything the masses will ever need. My ISP, Verizon, even does little monthly self tests on the network and they'll apparently send us free mesh networking nodes if they detect there's an area where some of our devices aren't getting good signal.
Why would apple even compete in this arena? When most users are having their needs met by their ISP for free? The only people really buying routers nowadays are the power users who want to be on the cutting edge of technology. And that's an area where apple doesn't like to compete. So it makes sense that they don't.