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.
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.
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.
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?
The one moderately popular competitor is the project in the OP that is suffering directly from this upstream change.
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.
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.
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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.