I don't understand the bitching about it, we users were asking for this, it is the good thing about Lemmy/Fediverse, you have tons of options, and probably will have more, heck even the PWA are awesome, no need to download anything at all.
You have to accept to being tracked by Google, having an advertising id, all the data Firebase collects. Their ToS is large.
Users were asking for it, that's true. I guess users don't really care about being tracked, allowing google into their phone and indirectly supporting them controlling the web, thus enabling them to do things like manifest v3 or the web integrity API.
Ads? understandable, the dev has bills to pay. Not open source? Purists may hate it, but not the end of the world. Tracking? Google? No thanks, the beautiful design is not worth it.