[conartist6]

I had never seen Android malware until my mom showed me her phone. I think she's barely ever installed an app on purpose in her life, but there it was this malware that looked like the husk of a legit app repurposed to show banner ads after every phone call

[beAbU]

My MIL has an ungoogled huawei phone. She was trying to get some app and family told her she needs to get the play store to get the app.

Holy fucking shit. What a hive of scum and villany you encounter when searching for the play store. The first link on google launches a full screen PWA that looks _exactly_ like the play store. It took me a hot minute to realize that I was about to install something unsavoury. I almost wanted to dunk the phone in some bleach.

I'm an android user, and I prefer it over iPhone, but the surface area for attacks is way way way too large. Users who are less technically inclined are so damn vulnerable. I don't know how to fix this.

[MSFT_Edging]

When I bought an ipad a few years back, it had been at least 10 years since I was on the ios ecosystem(last iphone was the 3gs). I was shocked how hard it was to find what I was looking for. Instead of the Playstore minefield of free spyware apps, you now have cheap knockoffs, likely still spyware, but now everything costs $5 dollars.

I think there's two different sets of perverse incentives. On the apple side, it's how to trick you into a "small" purchase of 5 dollars. It's just a cup of coffee man, c'mon just a coffee. Essentially banking on some user will just add it to their apple tab for convenience.

On the android side, the expectation is primarily free apps, with paid generally being a premium app. There are some free apps that just do what they say, typically small side hustles from solo devs banking on some add revenue with the option to upgrade(Shout out to GoneMadMusicPlayer, paid for it back in 2013 and the devi is still out there supporting and responding to emails). If they're not that, they'll be spyware infested trap holes.

Fdroid is typically where I go when I'm looking for an app with a unix philosophy. Just do one thing simply. Voice recorder, guitar tuner, etc.

[jackstraw42]

this is what I'm talking about. I wish more folks in this thread had gone this direction.

I think those types of people like your MIL represent a very concerning bulk of Android users. So people are walking around with god knows what in their pockets, doing every single thing in their life through them these days. I thought others who had arrived at this thought would be alarmed too, but I'm not sure what to think anymore I guess.