[Daemon404]

Their motivation isn't really made clear in the bug (easier for developers to switch to is a little too vague), but if I had to guess, I'd bet the actual reason is that they want the debug/insight/whatever features from cronet available to all the third party dependencies in their monorepo, and a shim was the easiest way.

Doesn't make it a good look, though.

As an aside: Given history with Google's other OSS libs, I have absolutely no faith in them having a concept of a stable ABI, or even API. This is anecdotal of course.

[shereadsthenews]

It sound to me more like they want an easy way to exercise QUIC.

[Daemon404]

Possibly, yes.

Although, having a usable QUIC library and/or adding it to libcurl would have been less controversial.