[etherael]

One attempt where it became abundantly clear that the target audience was largely not interested in being saved from the alternative, all the while they were sabotaging their relationship with their successful retail channel by proceeding.

If Google sets out to do the right thing by consumers despite potentially sabotaging their own market success in the larger picture (people still read google ads on android devices, no matter how carrier crippled the experience is, Apple lose the ability to lock google ads out of the mobile space, Google wins) consumers not only reject the product but emphatically embrace the carrier crippled alternatives to the point where Google succeeds at it's objectives largely because of it's relationship with the carriers, why not tell the end users to get lost and deal with the status quo and start playing ball with the carriers?

Google is just a business, and they may make a case for how they'd like things to go, but at the end of the day if the market pushes them in another direction and they have no desire to adjust their DNA to the fundamental level required in order to pivot on this particular issue, and it ends up that with the direction the market is pushing they win anyway, just in a different way than they would have hoped, why not just go with that flow?