Though sometimes the higher ups might not be the same as (or understand) the actual audience.

In this case the higher ups may have been confused due to, say, looking at the app while indoors (and from the perspective of "let's judge this developer's work"), while the actual users would see it in a vehicle alongside the real sky (and from the perspective of "let's see how easy this is to match up with reality").

Ah, I see the confusion. You think the users are the dev's audience! /s

I suppose this is the lesson OP learned!

I wish more people knew it. So many times frustration of the system is directed at devs. They couldn't figure out X? Why is Z feature so shit? Etc.

That's a management thumbprint on the deliverable.

This is a valid hypothesis, and had this software been something you could update in the background, a valid experiment to run and see whether users like it.

But when it's embedded software on physical devices where the business will have to incur cost in order to ship and hit those users, I can absolutely see why management would do the same thing as what all of the competitors are doing.