Similarly, I'm not trying to be overly damning. And again, I don't think what they are doing is necessarily a bad strategy. I just don't think of them when I think of good software practices, sadly. If anything, I think the opposite. In that there are few things more unstable than trying to take on a dependency of something they have done.

Do they largely make this work for them internally? Seems so, yes. But taking on any sort of dependency to Google is something you can only do if you can keep up with their very large developer base.