It does seem reasonable that there should be some way, (outlined by the courts) to ephemerally text that gives it the same protections as an unrecorded phone call. Because in a world where it's not the 60s and business is done over text instead of phones we lost a lot of privacy with no change in the law itself.

I don't know anything about these specific conversations, but one obvious difference between phone/video and chat is that the former has to synchronous whereas the latter can be async.

Async can be more practical people who are very busy, are travelling, are located in different timezones etc.

It's not inherently ephemeral though. You can add deletion rules on top of that to try to pretend that it is, but the courts see right through that.

I'm struggling to think of any text-based communications that are inherently ephemeral. Generally anything committed to text is long lasting, and has always been (way pre-computer era).

If this goes through, all that will happen is that Google will re-engineer the backend to evade whatever standard set by the ruling. Who wins from this outcome? Perhaps the engineers getting paid and promoted to work on said project. Certainly not the courts or the "people".