Perhaps it was done to prevent spam, or to prevent misbehaving clients from wreaking havoc on its servers. From hearsay, I understand it's reasonably easy to g

Perhaps it was done to prevent spam, or to prevent misbehaving clients from wreaking havoc on its servers. From hearsay, I understand it's reasonably easy to get on the whitelist if you're a moderately-known app developer or a legit institution. This would lead me to believe Google's reasons are less nefarious in this case.