In comparison, Google's Play Store, from a world-wide perspective, receives tens of thousands of submissions each day (new submissions and updates to existing apps, both of which can essentially be potential malware). Also, those much smaller APK sites can pick and choose which apps they host. Yeah, it's a big source of malware but statistically it's also larger than any of those independent APK sites by a massive ratio. It's not perfect of course but I'll keep relying upon it as a primary source for apps and such. I don't consider the Play Store to be a major problem at all. So in reality they have once again reduced the information you have available to assess whether an app is safe to install or not. my example of a flashlight that wants the ability to install other apps. Secondly there are other red flags that you can spot from the permissions that you can't from this stuff, e.g. if the Play Store listing claims 'no data is shared with third parties' they are just repeating what they were told as if it is a fact: nothing in the code will tell them whether it's true or not). I'm sure that they've a prepared line for those who question this, but there are 2 problems with it: firstly the 'data safety' is a mix of technical information (what data the app can access) and the developer's claims (e.g. Now they have what they call 'data safety' information you can look at if you choose to, but you can't see the permissions at all until you've installed the app. Then they stopped showing you that information, but it was still there if you looked for it.

Unfortunately Google keep making that harder! Once upon a time you couldn't install an app without it showing you the list of permissions it would have (so if you tried to install a flashlight that wanted the ability to install other apps, access your contacts etc then you had to actively not look at the fact that it wanted all sorts of things it didn't need). No 'these days' about it: there has always been some malware make it into the Play Store, so some sense when installing apps has always been needed.

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