The claim was that Apple is giving someone a degraded experience. How is "Android user doesn't like their Android phone" evidence of a degraded experience for an iPhone user?
The reason why kids in USA don’t want Android isn’t the phones themselves but the way their messages get presented by Apple’s software. No teenager wants to be flagged as poor to their peers by a bright green bubble.
Imagine if Microsoft had done this 20+ years ago when they were on top. All emails sent from a Mac would be displayed in magenta Comic Sans when opened on Windows. Wouldn’t that have been a blatantly anticompetitive move to make Macs look worse to business users?
I understand, but that is a different discussion. "Alice doesn't want to appear poor to Bob" != "a degraded experience for Bob". If Microsoft had displayed emails in magenta Comic Sans they would have been harder to read, and thus a worse experience for the recipient, manipulative but still not emotionally manipulative - compare, say you install Linux on your former Windows PC and Microsoft change the boot loader to a war photo of a crying child being torn from her crying parents by an enemy solider and the text "I'll miss you so much".
Young iPhone users genuinely complain that the green bubble is searingly bright and ugly compared to the iMessage blue which is darker and less saturated.
I know the whole thing is kind of silly. But it clearly does have a surprisingly strong effect on people’s perceptions. And Apple has some history of deliberately rendering competing products as ugly (Mac OS X used to show Windows network shares with a grim icon of a beige CRT monitor).
There are supposedly psychological effects in using green at all, and there is also a known controversy over green bubble used on iOS bundled Messages app[1][2]. As for "should", not sure about that...
... what's degrading about green?