I believe these are certainly the result of deliberate decisions.

Remember when Google introduced fine-grained permission control, received much praise for it, then removed it almost immediately afterwards? To me, that showed they clearly valued the interests of themselves and their monetising "appvertiser" developers over the freedom of the users.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/awesome-privacy-featur...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/google-removes-vital-p...