I dunno, I'm not sure any of these rebuttals move me. I'm going to indulge in a reply against my better judgment.

How much iMessage is used relative to other services depends on who you ask, I guess, but nobody seems to think it's in the top 3, and most don't even think it's in the top five. SMS is by all accounts #1, with things like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger coming in after that, with WeChat climbing the charts globally.

Google doesn't own SMS, but I still contend Google is responsible for this "green vs. blue" construct, and it has has been a success in terms of mindshare.

It goes like this… Google considers Apple an important threat, and everyone has seen that Apple considers iMessage an important strength. To mitigate the threat of iMessage, Google and its allies position iMessage as a bigger threat than it is, paint it as more evil than it is, deploy the walled-garden proprietary rhetoric playbook, etc. Comment threads erupt with debates over all of this. Congress pays half-assed half-informed attention and says some hand-wavey stuff about competition and whatnot. Well-meaning and well-informed commenters pick up on competition as well, and start debating the anti-competitiveness of Apple, arguably begging the question, but earnestly considering Apple's marketplace practices all the same.

Any one or more of several things can happen out of this that benefit Google. iMessage and blue bubbles could go from being a mark of exclusivity to being more of a scarlet letter, blunting iMessage's competitive impact. Apple could be compelled to make concessions, commercially or technically, that "open up" (mandate support for third-party access) the iMessage product, kneecapping its exclusivity and thus blunting iMessages's competitive impact. Or maybe the kerfluffle helps drive people more toward the third-party messaging services that aren't having their closed, proprietary status challenged, like WhatsApp, WeChat, or, laughably, some Google chat product. Or maybe everyone just quits acting so much like iMessage is such a big deal, stealing some of Apple's thunder.

In any case, it's thoroughly ironic that this is all in light of iMessage working with SMS at all. If iMessage were truly closed and proprietary, iPhone users would still be using separate apps for SMS and for iMessage. Did Apple make a mistake allowing the Messages app to work with both iMessage and SMS? If it ends with the government forcing Apple to make changes to the iMessage product, and if that ends up putting iMessage at a disadvantage relative to the chat products not subject to such government regulation, then maybe.

If a future in which the government decides which chat apps win and lose is the one we want, then okay.

In the meantime, what we have is a situation in which Apple's chat app is competing on its own merits against other chat apps, to some extent because Apple's chat app already interoperates with SMS in a way that other chat apps do not, while those other chat apps are likewise competing on their own merits, and, as a result (and back to the original point), are enjoying a great deal more success by any metric than iMessage is.

There aren't any numbers that position iMessage at the top of the heap, unless you narrowly count only iPhone users who use only iMessage and SMS, which is of course a circular argument. The top of the actual heap is already controlled by those aligned with Google against Apple. Perceptions to the contrary are manufactured by those at the top of the heap, in service to themselves. If it's about users, this is a defensive campaign waged by the current market leadership to mitigate the impact of their biggest rival's most visible competitive weapon.

And by the way, nobody's actually even suffering. Everyone's making out hand over fist, all the way around. Except Beeper I guess.

Now if you want my raw opinion, which maybe you do if you've read this far? Google has embarrassed themselves repeatedly in messaging. This is them trying to make up for that and draw attention away from their own string of self-inflicted failures.

Otherwise, we might all still be using a Google-native chat product like we all were ten years ago.