I have to suspect they thought whoever was gullible enough to pay $3-6 a month for an alarm app would surely not care about their data going along with it.
But sometimes I feel myself slipping closer and closer to your much more cynical ideas.
In particular I remember donating what for me was a good chunk of money to Caddy right before they started "experimenting with business models" or whatever he called it. Same goes for happily paying WhatsApp, walking around like a living talking billboard for it only to have them sell out to Facebook shortly after.
Just two examples from the top of my mind.
History has taught us that an enforced rule of law is the only way to prevent scammers from being the dominate players (by number, not size) in a market.
Law makes cheating less adaptive. But even without law, cheats would not exceed some small minority.
They added ChatGPT and all sorts of other shit to it unfortunately but the core functionality is still good