It's the furthest thing from "offshore" if "onshore" for you is the US. The US team had a mandate to put features that are more tuned to US sensibilities into a wildly successful app that caters to a completely different style of market and is wildly successful there.

It was natural for OPs team to have pushback since they have no knowledge of what works in India even if the entire app was developed in the US by a different team. The fact that Google culture that makes it so easy to do said pushback was just icing on the cake.