This got me thinking, this is kind of encouraged from an engineering perspective. It's a lot easier to not have to maintain all these different versions, and just have one. Not necessarily the reason they're doing it because google already has this working at scale for search, but still intriguing at least for smaller companies that operate globally.
In this case it isn't. Marijuana is federally illegal in the United States, if they profit at all from apps that help connect buyers and sellers of an illicit (in the U.S>) substance, they suddenly expose themselves. They could lose government contracts, they could face criminal investigation, could have funds seized, could have payment processors and banks drop them as customers, etc.
Yeah, although I work in the fintech industry and we have to do a lot of work to comply with local regulations and data sovereignty laws in most countries. It's daunting but you can still engineer to have the same versions of applications deployed globally with different configurations per region.
