I don’t think we need to identify Google’s motives as malicious. Google has been trying to get people to use its own messaging apps, but Google missed the boat, bungled the user experience, and kept confusing people with new apps.

Google would probably love it if Android shipped with a Google-branded, end-to-end encrypted messaging app that people liked to use.

I think that there is a combination of internal Google problems and problems in Google’s relationships with Android vendors that makes this difficult. And then, any such app would be probably be in, what, 6th place at this point? Meanwhile, Meta has apps #1 and #2.