Comment by cj

And just so we're attacking the problem from both sides: the dark pattern on the advertisers side is the inability to easily opt out of in-app ads when advertising on Google's display network. For the reasons you listed, in-app ads generate an incredible amount of low quality clicks, yet Google makes it very hard to exclude yourself from that ad inventory.

The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.