I asked a relative to look for RealVNC on the Play Store and install it. Once they were done, I asked them to fulfill a basic task inside RealVNC and they were really confused by my instructions. I took a look at their phone, lo and behold, they had installed a different app. I asked them to repeat the install procedure while I watched. They punched in “realvnc” in the search box, two identically formatted results appeared. Their finger instinctively clicked the Install button on the top result. It was an ad. 🤦♂️🤦♀️🤦
I bet a lot of those people leave such apps installed after the fact.
The fun part is once an app is installed, it tends to stay installed for a very long time, and often will even follow them to new phones because what does your phone helpfully offer to do when you first set it up? It asks if you want to transfer all of your data to it. So it transfers everything, including all of your installed apps. I’ve uninstalled flashlight apps from back when phones didn’t have such functionality consistently built in
