I hate to bring this up, but some teens live in these little tidal pools where all of their friends have iPhones and thus use iMessage for messaging. When most of the people on a group text are in iMessage, significant benefits accrue to also being on iMessage: The texts are more reliable, the threading works, and reactions appear appropriately. That's the primary reasonable argument for a kid whining that they specifically want an iOS phone. One thing to remember as a parent is that they don't need an expensive iPhone to use iMessage. (Or TikTok, for that matter.) The $429 iPhone SE works just fine, as do reasonably recent refurbished models. For more on this topic, see our analysis of which iPhone you should buy.