Niantic started life as an internal team at Google working on monetising location data. Being a revenue centre was the whole point from day one.

Only the "delivery robots" bit of this is actually news. Niantic being a datamining operation that tricked its users into scanning the real world for it is not. Hell Zuboff devoted a chunk of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" to it and that book came out in 2019.

(There's an old saying that makes the point: the only truly intuitive interface is the nipple. All others are learned.)

Sorry, but that interface is a learned one too. If you've ever sat and helplessly watched a new mother and baby trying to work out how to get some milk INTO baby, you know what I mean.