Arguably, that's more to do with the standard and Google's proprietary extensions. The colors thing has been discussed ad nauseum. SMS messages have been green from day one - see https://youtu.be/G8d7E26WLsY?t=1723. If colors were reversed, there'd be the same complaints. If the difference between iMessage and SMS were highlighted any other way, there'd be complaints too.
The standards issue is only relevant to E2EE. It has no bearing on the usability issues here. The E2EE issues should be fixed soon according to Apple. I'd bet a good amount of money the usability issues will remain.
The white-on-acid-green color combination would not make it through any accessibility review. It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see, and objectively unpleasant otherwise.
Apple gets plenty of complaints about it. Just look at the Apple forums. Their literal advice to fix it is "make your friends buy an iPhone".
> It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see
What form of color blindness doesn't let people differentiate between levels of brightness? I checked a couple color blindness simulators and it appears legible.
Heck, white on light green appears to be used in articles about good design for color blind accessibility without any indication that it there's anything wrong with it.
As someone with strong deuteranopia (I struggle to differentiate shades of green and darker bluey-reds), I am extremely sceptical about that claim too. For what it's worth, I've never had a problem reading the white-on-green bubbles in Messages. I do agree that a contrast closer to WCAG's recommendation would be better (currently 2:1, recommendation is ~4.5:1), but this is a diversion. The point I was making is that no matter what Apple does here, there is visible differentiation, and people will complain about it.
Google provides a client and infrastructure, which they sell to carriers and which has a number of proprietary extensions, including E2EE if the message is Google to Google. If a carrier does not provide Universal Profile, Google provides it. If you send a message using Google Messages, it may default to Google's profile, which is not open and only available to Google Messages users, which is arguably no different to iMessage. Apple provides an RCS client which relies on carrier infrastructure. If there is no compatible profile AIUI, it falls back to MMS or fails.
