Can someone take the time to explain to me what this means for someone who has an interest in developing Android apps that may make use of Google APIs? I don't

Can someone take the time to explain to me what this means for someone who has an interest in developing Android apps that may make use of Google APIs? I don't know how quotas work and why it sounds like you could request an increase when you hit a limit, wouldn't they want you to move to a paid tier? Does this mean that as soon as your app becomes popular, you are doomed to fail? I've looked briefly at a few Google APIs and they seem strange. So there's no longer a straight search API, you have to put some params on a "custom search API" that only has something like 100 searches per day? But on the other hand, hit the Google Local Business API and you can make 10k requests...and then there are APIs that were shut down all together, like translation. This is really weird to me. Is it supposed to make any sense?