The failure of the OS is not identifying those updates as a single app and applying the same permissions

But it works for other apps, no? I'm no app developer, completely out of my depth here, but it sounds like Google isn't following whatever process Apple has set, as opposed to Apple screwing Google over specifically (which there are many examples of)

It doesn't work for other apps because it's unrealistic to expect that only Google "isn't following" A non "lazy and incompetent design" would make "non-following" a non-issue unless ... well, that's where you actually need to know what's going on and prove that it's such a special case of non-following that it's hard-to-impossible to design around - in which case yeah, the OS designers are off the hook