Jfc. The snowflakes here.
Yes, fuck Apple, sure. But tell your kids they don’t have to care. In the end it’s just a computer and any relationship that actually matters won’t teeter on which fucking app you use. If your kid is getting ostracized from a group ONLY because they don’t use iMessage, tell them they’ve found the wrong group and they’re worth way more than that. Real friends are more than willing to take a 2-second step and install a second chat app to accommodate friends who cannot use iMessage. There are more androids out there than iPhones anyway.
Corporations are not your friends. They will not take responsibility for your kids unless they’re forced or they decide they want to get paid for doing it. Your kids deserve to know how to navigate society despite this. Teach them.
If you think you know how bad one teen can get, try dealing with classrooms of them, for over a decade.
At that age in their development, their brains start sloughing off cells that it thinks it doesn’t need, so they go out and do stupid shit no matter what you try to tell them. They’re basically learning more from serious fuckups than anything else because those are the lessons that stick.
At that age you’ve just got to compromise. In this case, I’d say tell them they can get whatever phone they want as long as they pay for it themselves and hear out your concerns. If you’re the one buying, tell them tough shit, they get what they get, or make them write you an essay of why they think they deserve a one kind of phone over the one you think they ought to have. It gives you an opportunity to hear them out completely, call out bs, share some personal insight, or maybe even reconsider your own stance on the issue.