Hanlon's razor applies well to situations where social power is relatively even.

Once power is sufficiently uneven, the stupidity of the powerful is no different than their malice, for with that power comes the greater responsibility to avoid doing harm with it.

Hanlon's sledgehammer.

In this case both options seem to apply at the same time

It may be incompetence. Most of big tech today no longer understands why someone would build an app, a business, or a project for reasons other than seeking to extract money from the market. It is ironic, because most of the big tech companies are only as successful because they initially offered products with vision and purpose, rather than as means simply to extract revenue at the lowest cost.

They are not entirely wrong to view the market this way. Most apps and projects are built these days primarily as means to extract revenue from the market at a low cost. Sometimes they are so much this that we call them grifts, and there have been many in tech recently, and certainly on the Play Store. But there are still some companies with better values.

This is a long way to say that unless an app/project/business/website is evidently monetized, it can probably be assumed it's monetized by selling data or ads. Likely, this assumption was made by the reviewer here, there may even be guidelines about it.

To some degree, it would even benefit consumers to do such a reality check too before they buy products and subscribe to services — is this a visionary purpose-driven product, or one that seeks to extract money from me as its primary goal? If latter, how do they do it — in evident ways, or through selling data or ads/influencing? But one must be able to see nuance that not everything in the world is built for the capitalistic objective. Sometimes, cool things are built, art is made, and inventions are made to better the world.

Overall, it is a problem that they don't see this nuance which made Google successful in the first place. It is clear across their business, products and services. But I think it is not unexpected.

An app shot down because it doesn't grift in an evident way, under an assumption it grifts in a hidden way — it's not the most wrong decision in the world. It just does not demonstrate competence either.

s/malice/avarice.

Incompetence at scale is malice.