Arguably true, but if you rely on a hidden, undocumented feature and it changes or goes away and you don't like it, I'm not sure you have any right to complain since its volatile nature was quite clear from the start.

But with no clear user-facing way to activate it, meaning you have to use some unofficial app that accesses it in an undocumented manner, it has the smell of something that you could not rely upon as a "feature."

If it's there and it works, then great for you, but you can't expect a whole lot more. It sucks that they didn't actually make it a published feature with an actual means of accessing it, and take on the responsibility of maintaining it, because it seems like something I'd like to use.

> If you put software into the wild - you have released it.

Even by that definition Google never released it. You needed a 3rd party app to access the feature, Google's software alone was not enough. Google didn't fail here, they flat out never released it.

Or perhaps you could argue that they failed by not releasing it (or something similar), but that's different story.