Anyone remembers when the android play store wasn't ranked by how much revenue google got out of it? Remember when even google employees put out their own apps

Anyone remembers when the android play store wasn't ranked by how much revenue google got out of it? Remember when even google employees put out their own apps free of ads like solitare etc. But all these free, ad-less apps mysteriously either disappeared from play store or got sent to the very bottom of every search query?