It need not be malice. It maybe because the design people think people are too stupid to understand URLs.
As other comment mentioned, Safari does it too.
The trend seems to be abstracting away stuff like filesystem. Many people I know don't even organize stuff into folders on their phones. Everyone seems to dump everything in Download or something like that. The existence of separate applications for Music, Video and Photo content makes it irrelevant to some extent.
> It maybe because the design people think people are too stupid to understand URLs
You may be right, but it's hard to see why this would be a concern in 2020. The number of users who have actually grown up with URLs in their childhood increases all the time.
Anecdotally, it seems computer literacy is actually dropping over time. I taught an entry-level scripting course aimed at medical graduate students for several years, and each year the number of students who did not comprehend even the concept of files and folders was higher than the previous year.
I don't think dealing with files made people any more computer literate, nor is understanding the folder/file UI abstraction any more of a badge of tech literacy than understanding what "pull to refresh" might do on an iPhone.
We like to overdramatize the importance of computer literacy because we take it for granted that computers are our livelihood, not some principled quest of self-betterment to understand the world.
We're like a group of mechanics finishing each other's sentences over how everyone should know how a carburetor works, and then circlejerking over how we "failed the people" with the move to power steering. And don't even get us started on how push-button ignition set the public's car literacy back 100 years from the golden age of turning a key to really understand the inner workings of locomotion.
We failed by no longer giving anyone the ability or even the right to understand their tools. A computer is just a tool to get things done. It's perfectly reasonable that to a lot of people, it will remain this black box of magic they'll never understand. But now it's a black box to everyone, including non-technical people who cared enough to know more about their tools even if they weren't their primary interest.
It feels to me that tech will eventually hit a point where there's only two ways to interact with it. Either you're a "typical user" who has a glass orb you speak into and pray that it does what you ask without shattering to prevent tinkering, or you're a programmer who gets a command line and that's it.
Growing up with computers as a new thing that most adults didn't understand, the majority of people who understood them were children. I also thought that as computers were everywhere, children after me would all understand them, but that didn't happen.
With ubiquitous computing, the ratio of children who understand to children who don't is a little higher than when I grew up, but not that much. Clearly, some children grew up with me who were willing didn't get the skills because they had no access, but lots of kids are either need directed instruction to attain technical literacy, or are unwilling or incapable of attaining it.
As other comment mentioned, Safari does it too.
The trend seems to be abstracting away stuff like filesystem. Many people I know don't even organize stuff into folders on their phones. Everyone seems to dump everything in Download or something like that. The existence of separate applications for Music, Video and Photo content makes it irrelevant to some extent.