While your perspective makes some sense, it's highly improbable. It's unlikely that Google was aware of F-Droid's infrastructure specs, or its inability to fix the issue in advance.
It seems you're suggesting a very specific, targeted attack.
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.
Thank you for the interesting insight. This is more or less what I expected.
> suspicions were plausible but incorrect
The suspicions were not about the evil will of the engineers. It's the will of Google itself (or managers, if you want), which plays the main role here. This is exactly what causes the following:
> engineering teams continued to be resource-constrained
It reminds me a bit of Boeing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19914838
The resource constraints had nothing to do with intentionally not funding "support a competing browser properly", though, and everything to do with just not funding engineering and test work at all except to build Shiny Idea That Got A Promo.
Despite its size, Google does shoestring engineering of most things, which is why so much is deprecated over time -- there's never budget for maintenance.
So I mean in some sense yes, there's valid criticism of Google's "will" here, but that will was largely unaware of Firefox, and the consequences burned Google products and customers just as much or more in the long run. Nightingale looked past individual instances to see a pattern, but didn't continue to scale the pattern up to first-party products as well.
> It seems you're suggesting a very specific, targeted attack.
Yes, just like it happened with Firefox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38926156