Google have suspended Element in the Play Store without notifying us; we’re reaching out to find out what’s going on. Apologies for the inconvenience; in the interim there’s https://f-droid.org/en/packages/im.vector.app/ but it’s a few versions behind. We’ll post updates here.
It was mainly based around seeing people not wanting to use the Fdroid repos/version on a Mastodon thread - for whatever reason being a few builds behind seemed like it was worse than not using the service at all, in case anyone was like that here I thought it worthwhile to share (Edit: especially if encryption is not on their priority list and they just wanted a quick way to login).
I have a mixed view on Matrix in general but agree with your assesment of the web portal.