This is about the dumbest thing I've read since a long time. Bored wannabe journalist pulls a problem out of the worlds ass.
I read the article until the argument that the "green was intentionally made ugly". It's just ridiculous. Colors have their limited meaning, but it's mostly dictated by context - be it other colors, images, ... And green is in no way an ugly color, even in a poisonously saturated version. If you want to have significant data on this topic, read Beauty by Sagmeister and Walsh, who concluded that most people consider ****-like brown to be ugly, but green was nowhere near that (Blue was by far the favourite though).
From a design perspective its clear, that Apple needs to signal the feature disparity somehow (where the reasons of the disparity might be of technological, design and business related nature). Choosing two different colours with similar saturation and brightness, both of which are consistently used in their design language -- hell, the message app itself is THAT green -- is the most natural and neutral thing to do (allthough the blue certainly puts a light bias in here).
Now does Apple intentionally segment their user base here? Of course they do. Everybody who utilises the power of branding does it. But in this case they do it as subtly as possible. I really think its design wise one of the best ways to accomplish this task.
The problem described here has nothing to do with Apple. It's purely a matter of the maturity of society. There always has been the rich kids, the wannabe rich kids and the poor kids at school. I was one of the poor kids and i never had fancy brand stuff. And yes, other kids made fun of me. Try being the only one not wearing Nike sneakers, see who's talking to you then - loser.
It's part of life, it's part of economics. As long as there is an income disparity (which is another topic), there will be people buying vanity items. Yes it's painful as a kid, but its better to learn this lesson young than as an adult, because there is no escaping it. Making a whole fuzz about "green message bubbles" out of it is beyond ridiculous... and most likely paid by the competition who would kill to have the same brand power.
