> In other words: this is all but impossible to impact regular users, and it requires a particularly careless developer to be hit by it.

Have you ever worked with someone who barely knows how to use a mobile phone? They will hand their phone over to someone they barely even know to do something they don't understand. They will follow instructions from a stranger over the phone, without understanding what the phone is warning them about.

I have worked with such a person. They did have someone walk them through a dubious process. Thankfully they realized what was going on before the process was complete, but who knows how much damage was done by the initial steps.

There are legitimate security reasons here. Whether there are reasons beyond that is an open question.

Following this logic, shouldn't we just ban smart phones for everyone then? If we need to dumb down all technology to the absolute lowest level, we should probably ban computers or at least require an official government-controlled license to get access to one. Is this a world you want to live in? Me neither.

You are right, better locking them out of the Play Store, there's too much risk using it.

We could also imagine a 24h delay to get Play Store access

Those people will be conned in a million other ways.

Can we freaking sell them dumbphones, then, and stop destroying portable computers for everyone else with that excuse?

Which incidentally is often just a pretense for other motives?

If computers have suddenly become so dangerous for normal people, and they want smartphones nonetheless, add to them a dumb-mode encouraged at the initial setup, and requiring some third party assistance to turn it off once enabled..! (and forbid apps to change their behavior if it's not enabled)