> A sketchy, battery-draining implementation with questionable privacy may not see widespread adoption.

A battery draining implementation may be the best they can do by themselves, and, from past form, the lack of privacy is a feature and not a bug.

They’ve really gone out of their way to adopt a centralized solution, when a decentralized solution would be better in almost every way.

I doubt the developers have much input, will be some incompetent dinosaurs in middle management pushing for this.