Comment by drnick1
5 days ago
> Do you not run apps at all?
No, I don't want to run any apps, particularly commercial ones. I only run a few FOSS apps like K9, IronFox, Signal, Home Assistant.
I have, on occasion, downloaded and tested apps from the Play Store in a separate profile, and my experience of such apps has been extremely negative. Clearly, these apps don't exist for the user's benefit, and their purpose is to extract information about the user, including phone number, location, other apps used, contacts, etc.
I get that you'd want to protect you data, but that list is a bit weird. The phone number is rarely available to the apps today - you need to provide it yourself typically (SIM feature rather than Android thing), location can be denied, contacts can be denied, listing other apps requires a permission that very few apps are allowed to carry. Typically apps cannot do any of what you listed without explicit approval and it's definitely true for the legit ones.