| The safety-argument functions as an apologetic narrative to justify the gatekeeping. Strangely, almost everything the Play Store pushes at me (Temu, TikTok, millions of communication apps with dubious reputation) is crap. I would never install an app without checking the permissions it asks for, researching the owner of the app as well as the the tracking it includes - yet the store never makes those things transparent, quite the opposite. Google even takes money to show you bad apps through PlayStore app ads designed to look like an organic app listing. This is apparently a mechanism to profit directly from deceiving users. (Right now, for example, it shows a gambling app, some "beautifying" shovelware, and "Tango live streaming," which the author probably believes by heart is not made for porn.) So either Google is trying to protect its users and just isn't very good at it, or it's a fake argument to hide corporate power. But it's impossible to know for sure, isn't it? |
https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/