Considering a lot (all?) of AI is currently being sold at a loss, I wonder if all that outpouring of interest is exactly the reason why they're changing course, as it would've otherwise been too expensive to offer.

It could've also just not been ready for prime time and couldn't actually live up to its promises, so they decided that shelving it was less of a reputational impact than releasing a defective product.

Probably someone who realized "build your own apps" means "empowering users to build competing apps that don't send marketing telemetry back to google"

Why do you care who over why they did that?