A developer working with ten Android 6.0.1 phones — old enough that Google Play Services barely functions — stumbled into something instructive. Freed from the Play Store's gravity, they discovered lightweight apps, F-Droid, and the satisfaction of compiling from source. The old hardware became a feature, not a bug. The trouble started when they tried to bring a text editor called Tabby back into Google's ecosystem. The Play Store review rejected the app and attached a pornographic screenshot that had nothing to do with Tabby. The developer appealed, explaining the obvious mix-up. The appeal was rejected without explanation — presumably by someone who looked at the same irrelevant screenshot and rubber-stamped the original decision. The developer suspects Google's automatic app listing translations may have injected a link to a malicious site, or that the review process simply confused two apps. They cannot verify either theory because Google blocks developers from reading their own submitted content after rejection. The system is a black box that punishes you for its own errors. This is not an isolated complaint. The developer previously had Mermaid GDocs rejected through similarly opaque processes. The pattern is consistent: vague rejection reasons, no human escalation path, and the constant threat that repeat submissions could trigger full developer account deletion. The chilling effect is the point — it is cheaper for Google to over-reject than to build a functional review pipeline. Google is simultaneously consolidating its monopoly position over Android app distribution through Play Integrity API requirements and failing at the basic operational task that would justify that monopoly. The company demands exclusive gatekeeping power while running a gate that cannot distinguish a text editor from pornography. The developer's response is rational: abandon the Play Store entirely, publish on F-Droid and itch.io, and accept a smaller audience in exchange for not being subject to a Kafkaesque review apparatus. This is the quiet exodus that erodes platform legitimacy — not a dramatic antitrust ruling, but thousands of small developers deciding the platform is not worth the humiliation. The 20-year question is whether Android's open-source roots survive Google's drive to lock down distribution. Every developer who leaves the Play Store for F-Droid is a data point arguing that the open ecosystem Google inherited is being strangled by the closed one Google is building.
