Yes, that's definitely unfortunate. I don't remember it being required with older versions of the Authy app. I really hate forced cloud service integration, especially in applications that deal with sensitive material.

they don't, but they want to have a way to verify who you are for things like the sync feature. Even if you don't want to use the feature.

This is a pretty good example of not doing something because it represents a minority and would make onboarding more difficult for their actual value-add.