Why is this contact green and not blue?
Three questions. We will tell you what changed and who changed it — and settle the blocking question honestly.
Green = not iMessage Blue = iMessage
Answer the question above and we will tell you what green means here.
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Green does not mean blocked
This is the single most common thing people believe about green bubbles and it is not true. Blocking does not reliably turn bubbles green. Anyone telling you green equals blocked is wrong, and if you are reading this at two in the morning trying to work out whether someone has cut you off, please read the next three paragraphs before you conclude anything.
Here is the mechanism. Blocking on an iPhone works on the receiving end. Their phone accepts your message and then declines to show it to them. Your phone is not told this — it cannot be, because telling you would defeat the purpose of a silent block. So from your side, a blocked conversation generally looks exactly like a normal one. Bubbles stay whatever colour they were. Messages often still say "Delivered".
Meanwhile green happens for a long list of reasons that have nothing to do with you. They switched to an Android phone. They turned iMessage off. They are on a plane, or abroad without data, or in a basement. Their phone is in for repair and they are using a loaner. Their Apple Account got signed out after a reset. Every one of those turns your conversation green, and none of them means anything about how they feel about you.
Some people will tell you to look at whether "Delivered" disappears, or to send an iMessage and watch what happens, or to call from a withheld number. Read the honest version of what those tests can and cannot tell you in our guide on what "Not Delivered" actually means. The short version: there is no reliable at-home test, the internet is full of confident people who think there is, and the colour of a bubble is not evidence of anything about a relationship.
The three endings, in full
If you would rather read than click, here is what the decoder above works out. Which one applies depends entirely on the pattern — whether it is everyone or one person, and whether it changed or was always this way. That distinction is the whole diagnosis.
Everything is green
The problem is on your iPhone. iMessage has stopped registering with Apple's service, so every message is falling back to a plain text. The usual causes, in order of how often they turn out to be it: the iMessage switch is off, your Apple Account is not signed in for Messages, there is no usable data connection, the clock is set manually and has drifted, activation is still pending after a reset, or a carrier settings update is waiting. The decoder above lists where to look for each.
One person, and it used to be blue
Something changed on their end. By a wide margin the most common answer is that they moved to an Android phone. If that is what happened, there is a second problem lurking: their number may still be registered to iMessage, in which case some of your messages are not just green, they are going nowhere at all. That one has a fix, and it is on their side — here is the procedure.
One person, and it was always green
Their number was never registered to iMessage. They are on Android, or they have an iPhone with iMessage switched off, or — the one people miss — you are texting a different number than the one they registered. iMessage registers specific phone numbers and email addresses, not people. A second line or an old contact card is enough to explain it.
What green actually costs you
Once you know why it is green, the useful question is what you are losing, and the answer has changed a lot recently. Green used to mean MMS, which meant compressed photos, no typing indicators, no read receipts and groups that barely worked. Now green can also mean RCS, which fixes most of that. The two look identical in the message list and behave completely differently.