> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.

You still don't! You don't have the play by their rules, and you can still target everyone who has a non-Google or non-Apple phone, which as a target market is appreciably no one, much as it was before Google and Apple entered the phone market.

You can target them if they have phones produced by your hated manufacturers anyway by making your app a webapp instead of a native app.

You don't want to do those things, and that's fine, but you're yearning to go back to a time that never existed.