[infamia]

What if someone else did all of that privacy research and monitoring for you, only it was a set of volunteers, and they did it for free? This is what F-droid does except they verify that apps on their store are clean at the source code level, compile the source code, and then publish it in their app store on behalf of the authors. When I'm looking for an app in the F-droid repo, I only need to wonder, "Is it any good?", because it is at least safe. They also warn you if the app does anything at all you might object to. For an example, check out the page for Firefox below, which at least gives you an idea of the kind of information available in the app.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

At times, Apple has removed apps capriciously out of self-interest and done things that aren't good from a privacy perspective. I trust F-droid to be a more equal an honest arbiter more than Apple since they don't have and reason to do something I wouldn't like. Basically, I'm saying that (in addition to scummy app stores) there would likely also be some app stores that do a better job than what Apple does at protecting you from the bad actors you just mentioned.