I hear this a lot, I’ve not known a single person who has considered it a status thing. There are people who have cheap phones from both apple and android and they were made fun of for the price of the phone, not the bubble color. iMessage just made it much nicer to talk to people. “I can send messages over wifi!” made it so you could send messages in school or anywhere with a big metal roof. “The images are better!” These were limitations of the SMS standard that Apple designed around. Now? Yeah, there’s other options, but back then iMessage made its hold by being able to be used by people who couldn’t use SMS or didn’t want to for whatever reason
I really mean no malice, but I did not find it great. I also got it for free, but even so I just never really got drawn in to the story or the gameplay. It just wasn’t that fun, too linear maybe