Modern mobile OS’ and apps are quite strictly sandboxed so, with reasonable vetting like Google Play Store and Apple Store, you can reasonably safely install random crap and uninstall it later. It’s a different realm from running random binary executables.
That depends on your definition of safe. Everyone wants to be a data broker these days, and the amount of data that can be gleaned from basic app permissions is startling. Not to mention that it’s just annoying. We already solved this “an app for everything” problem 40 years ago with the HTML/CSS/W3C standards and a regular old web browser. 90% of the apps out there could be websites, and the world would be better if they were. But having an app gives the publisher a lot more control over what they can do, how they can spam you, and what they can scrape, and that’s why everyone has their own stupid apps now.
Seemingly innocuous Play store apps get found to be viruses all the time, most recent in my memory being a few barcode scanner apps, farthest back in my memory being flashlight apps back before android did it natively, but there’s been more over the years. Trusting apps “because play store” is horrible practice.
Modern mobile OS’ and apps are quite strictly sandboxed so, with reasonable vetting like Google Play Store and Apple Store, you can reasonably safely install random crap and uninstall it later. It’s a different realm from running random binary executables.
That depends on your definition of safe. Everyone wants to be a data broker these days, and the amount of data that can be gleaned from basic app permissions is startling. Not to mention that it’s just annoying. We already solved this “an app for everything” problem 40 years ago with the HTML/CSS/W3C standards and a regular old web browser. 90% of the apps out there could be websites, and the world would be better if they were. But having an app gives the publisher a lot more control over what they can do, how they can spam you, and what they can scrape, and that’s why everyone has their own stupid apps now.
Seemingly innocuous Play store apps get found to be viruses all the time, most recent in my memory being a few barcode scanner apps, farthest back in my memory being flashlight apps back before android did it natively, but there’s been more over the years. Trusting apps “because play store” is horrible practice.