When you mention "competitors," what industries or markets are you referring to?
No one would write Android apps on a Chromebook, and making it harder to do so would only reduce the incentive for companies to develop Android apps.
How could Google benefit from pushing a newer instruction set standard on Windows and macOS?
I doubt Google even cares about F-Droid. The Play Store competes with the iOS App Store, Huawei's App Galery, and probably the Samsung Store long before F-Droid becomes relevant.
If they required a Google-specific Linux distro to build this thing or if they went the Apple route and added closed-source components to the build system, this could be seen as a move to mess with the competition, but this is simply a developer assuming that most people compiling apps have a CPU that was produced less than 15 years ago (and that the rest can just recompile the toolchain themselves if they like running old hardware).
With Red Hat and Oracle moving to SSE4.1 by default, the F-Droid people will run into more and more issues if they don't upgrade their old hardware.
F-Droid is so insignificantly small their entire userbase is smaller than the amount of users of each app in the top 500 of every single large store (Play, Galaxy, Huawei, etc.)
This happened because nobody gives a shit about F-Droid, not because it's somehow a "threat" with unmaintained apps.
> It seems you're suggesting a very specific, targeted attack.
Yes, just like it happened with Firefox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38926156
Former Chrome team member here. Nightingale's suspicions were plausible but incorrect. The primary cause of every one of these we looked into over the years (and there were indeed many) was teams not bothering to test against Firefox because its market share was low compared to the cost of testing for it. In many cases teams tried to reduce support burden by simply marking "unsupported" any browser they didn't explicitly test, which was sometimes just Chrome and Safari. We were distressed at this and wrote internal guidance around not doing things like the above, and tried to distribute it and point back to it frequently. Unfortunately Firefox' share continued to go down, engineering teams continued to be resource-constrained, and the problem continued to occur.
Several years ago I glumly opined internally that Firefox had two grim choices: abandon Gecko for Chromium, or give up any hope of being a meaningful player in the market. I am well aware that many folks (especially here) would consider the first of those choices worse than the second. It's moot now, because they chose the second, and Firefox has indeed ceased to be meaningful in the market. They may cease to exist entirely in the next five years.
I am genuinely unhappy about this. I was hired at Google specifically to work on Firefox. I was always, and still remain, a fan of Firefox. But all things pass. Chrome too will cease to exist some day.
The one moderately popular competitor is the project in the OP that is suffering directly from this upstream change.