They are bound to get in trouble with Google for this, but they can’t easily pull the feature. They can’t just be like „oh you’ve had translate for two weeks now, but now we can’t pay for it, so it’s gone.“
What is the long term thinking behind this? Or is this just developers and management not communicating?
They can't even plausibly pretend that they didn't know and it's all a big misunderstanding given the lengths they went to obfuscate it in the code.
Then some developers facing a deadline cobbled together something that “just made it happen” so they could kick the can down the road with something that worked, ideally long enough to collect their bonuses and find a new job so it becomes someone else’s problem.
Or maybe Telegram the company just likes to abuse other people’s things and see how long they can get away with bad behavior. Who knows.
…but with more elegant phrasing.
blah blah blah on 31st of February 1970 Google unanimously decided to terminate our access to their Translate API blah blah blah blah
From first look, I don't think they are. Telegram gets a new feature, Google gets more data to mine. It's a win-win. I just hope they'll be clear with their users about sending data to Google.