"Missing out because my parents are lame" is a minor social stigma that kids will (should!) experience in many situations anyways. The benefits significantly outweigh the drawbacks.
Friendships are importance for psychological health and development.
When you're excluded from the primary means of communications with potential friends, and can never find out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's not "minor".
Guess what, it's also common to buy kids clothing that lets them fit in, a haircut that lets them fit in, and let them watch the movies and TV shows other kids are watching so they can fit in. Kids want to fit in, in order to make friends, and it's healthy to make that easier than put arbitrary obstacles in their way.
And who's talking about bullies? When most of your kids' potential friends communicate using iMessage, it seems pretty presumptuous of you to say that they're all "not the best potential friends anyways." Actually, they might turn out to be great friends, because people are complex, and their messaging preference isn't determinative of their entire personality, or much of it at all.
Wanting to fit in is normal but unfortunately not everyone can afford to. There are a good amount of people out there who shame others for using Android ("green bubbles") because they treat their iPhone as a status symbol. If anything the arbitrary obstacles are put up by Apple and the people who choose to exclusively use iMessage because every other messaging service works on any device.
Used iPhones are cheap. Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol. iMessage just genuinely works better. Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it.
> Used iPhones are cheap
Not everyone wants to buy used.
> Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol.
Nobody needs to treat anything as a status symbol but they do. You see it all the time with different brand names, including Apple. It could even happen with different/older models.
> Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it.
Buying your kid an Android phone should not make them suffer socially. It's just as capable of running quality messaging apps minus the arbitrary exclusivity of iMessage. I wouldn't want my kid using iMessage even if they had an iPhone just because it will exclude other kids for no good reason.
Friendships are importance for psychological health and development.
When you're excluded from the primary means of communications with potential friends, and can never find out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's not "minor".