At this point, why not just wait for Apple to release their RCS implementation?
The nicest thing about iMessage (for me, at least) has always been that it was a significant improvement to SMS that just worked, with graceful fallback to SMS for anyone who didn't use it. No installing third party apps, wondering if someone new I wanted to contact would be on that messaging app, etc. A nice bonus, but not something that would ever get in my way. Wanting to install a third-party app on an Android phone just to get blue bubbles is weird.
The nicest thing about iMessage (for me, at least) has always been that it was a significant improvement to SMS that just worked, with graceful fallback to SMS for anyone who didn't use it. No installing third party apps, wondering if someone new I wanted to contact would be on that messaging app, etc. A nice bonus, but not something that would ever get in my way. Wanting to install a third-party app on an Android phone just to get blue bubbles is weird.