[doctorpangloss]

AppLovin has been doing this for a long time. BlueStacks and some other vendors have been doing this for literally a decade.

The root problem is that Google Play is poorly curated. One problem it has is that it ranks apps that have many downloads higher than those with fewer downloads. AppLovin is used to boost downloads for the purposes of the Google Play algorithm.

Of course, this is known to Google.

[bedelman]

Are you sure BlueStacks installs apps without user consent? I know BlueStacks as an emulator to play Android games on PC and Mac. That's a legitimate business, 100% consistent with what users want. Versus what I (author of the piece linked above) reported is that AppLovin is installing apps that users don't want -- installing silently, installing when users tap X, installing after a quick (5 second) countdown.

[doctorpangloss]

> Are you sure BlueStacks installs apps without user consent?

You think deeply about that question.