[ortusdux]

Google 'subsidizes' some of their services by leveraging them to gain valuable information. Google voice was used to train their voice analysis algorithms. Recaptcha has been used to transcribe text for google books, road signs etc for street view, and now objects for waymo.

If I had to bet, photos was subsidized by the value of the training pool it generated for their object recognition neural networks. The cost of image storage has only gone up, and the I would image they have enough images to train on, so they did the math and removed the major incentive (unless you buy one of their phones).

I would also bet that they had a meeting at some point trying to figure out how to push people to sign up for google one storage. I just wish they had decided to offer legit customer support for paid users.