Comment by jeroenhd

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.