It's like they develop products just enough to get people using them so they can squeeze out some more meta-data and connect the dots back to a Google account, and then they stop development because it's not going to add more revenue.
And if they can't figure out how to push advertising with it, they drop it.
Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions.
This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.
For example: About a third of the streets that show on GMaps for my previous town don't actually exist - they're paddocks. Every other map is correct: HERE, Apple Maps, OSM, TomTom, etc. As Google notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.