Yeah they only review when you make a new release, so maybe these apps just haven't been updated in a while

"Text Free - Call and Text Now" Updated January 10, 2022

"Free Now" - Update January 11, 2022

Many other examples have recent updates too.

I was always wondering how Free Now can stay in the Play Store with their name. Maybe it is a trademark thing (as this is a trademark).

But yeah - the rules seem quite arbitrarily enforced.

As said in other discussions about Google - I decided to untangle my life from Google further. Quite hard actually as I am a paying GSuite customer and a lot of stuff actually is tied to this account. :-(

we have an isp in france called Free - so yeah, at least somewhere it's a trademark. though this is not the real reason they ban it. people are cheapo so they all want free stuff, so they tend to search for "<app> free", and google tries to reduce the squatting on this keyword.

it always baffled me how people always feel this need to explicitly search for free stuff, without looking first if it is always free (esp. in the case of opensource software). I once had to cleanup of viruses the computer of a classmate that got all the viruses because he searched for "python free" and fell for a crappy, virus-loaded, fake version...

Not quite, it is only reviewed when you make an update to the play store description, not when you publish a new version.

Nah. Probably exclude app already in store.

Nah. Probably exclude any app under X downloads, and even then just pick a random sample every once in a while, and even then maybe the reviewer had better stuff to do that Monday and just waved everything through.