Google. A search giant. A machine learning leader. They can save me from a typo in the web search, but can't in the Play store.
That's another reason to switch to F-Droid.
That's another reason to switch to F-Droid.
They DO seem to have some sort of review process in place:
https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_How-To/
See: Application Review Process.
I don't know how exhaustive it is or how effective it is in practice though.
(And for the record I'm an f-droid user)
2) The F-Droid maintainers manually build the apps on F-Droid from the respective code repositories. They will notice when something like that is off. This has to do with it being FOSS.
And if you're wanting to tell me that this doesn't scale, not really, no, but it's the same thing that Linux distros have been doing for a long time and Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical actually do have a crapton of users, especially on the server side.
Every one of those distros gets around volume of desired apps by allowing the inclusion of third-party repos (e.g. current Python or docker) which in turn introduces typo squatting as a vector.
You're asking for app store maintainers to slow everything to a crawl and never get popular. No entity which wants to be successful will do that, corporate or otherwise.
"Security via unpopularity"
If it were popular we'd see just as much malware for linux.
So, this strategy would barely work, as users would only look on the internet for a download, if it's not in this trusted repository and then it's gonna be a really unpopular application. (Theoretically, it's possible for your grandma to go on the internet before checking this trusted repository, but that is really just so much more effort.)
If Linux was 90%+ of the market, getting people to download some stuff with a curl command promising some BS or having people download and run sudo would only need to touch a fraction of users to be highly valuable. That's just a random example off the top of my head. And also because I don't use Linux on desktop so I don't fully know how everything works there.
And if someone thinks regular people would be "too scared" of CLI to pipe curl into sudo sh, remember that people are "too scared" of developer tools in browsers too, and yet Facebook and others have to implement self-XSS protection measures in there, because it turns out there's nothing too complicated in computing when it stands between a person and fulfilling their desire (as promised by a scammer).
I'm sure that's not true for all Linux repositories. But humans certainly do look at all apps going to the App Store.
roughly 3% of the world internet users. Sure, 3% is not much, but it's still multiple hundred of millions of people
The actual number of users is closer to 3 billion, so even if your 3% is correct (it isn't) that's not even 100 million.
That's also assuming that every user of the internet is a laptop or desktop to access the internet, but that isn't case. More and more people are only using a smartphone or tablet, especially in emerging markets.
The netmarketshare stats have been hovering around this for a few months, and all the "global internet usage" stats that I could find were closer to 3.75 billions.
Even then, assuming 3 billion, it's still 90 million users... that's most than the inhabitants of any country in the european union
Also, thinking back to the bad old days and the script-kiddie-eseque of many viruses of the early 2000s (iloveyou, et al), I suspect it may come down to attacking what you know: Windows was more prevalent and better understood so that's what people tried to break.
Not my field though, so all just speculation.
Besides machine intervention, this seems like a company the size of Google could easily help (if not solve) while creating a lot of good will by hiring a few at-home workers to better flag or check in on certain applications. Off the top of my head, this wouldn't require a ton of training and you could even provide burner-like phones for folks to download the apps to and play a bit on.
Well, I'm not so sure. For example, if you search, in French, for the correctly spelled phrase "Avez-vous aidé quelqu'un aujourd'hui" they suggest the wrong spelling "Avez-vous aider quelqu'un aujourd'hui", which is a grammatical abomination.
But if you need to download WhatsApp to communicate with loved ones, you can't get it from F-Droid, right?
Your question demands an answer, for real. As does mine.
There has to be a middle ground. In this case, unfortunately, besides close friends or family who know something about tech, you will have to be the one to compromise and use their apps. Plus, I've seen getting people to move to your communication methods which are less popular usually leads to less talking. Not always, just something I've noticed isn't uncommon. I end up talking to people more if we just use FBM or iMessage or something.
The method the other commenter suggested also works.
But yes, these are anecdotal for WhatsApp, which I presume was just an example on your side.
You'd have to mainly use F-Droid and then make some exceptions for those apps. You could also use Yalp store (which interfaces with the Play Store) or Aptoide to get those apps, if you don't want to keep the Google Play Services around, though I cannot make any claims of these being more secure.
They aren’t cutting edge, but neither are the equivalently priced Androids.