I agree with what you have said. It's what you mentioned at the end about people judging based on metrics - it should be up to people to judge for themselves, not the platform! The platform should present data, not try to sway opinions. Besides the message itself is so hand wavy if I am using the phrase correctly, what is Google trying to convey through the message? If something is a legit scam, they should either not be publishing such apps or be testing and removing them.

I am increasingly convinced they are trying to direct traffic to apps that use their Ads network under the guise of such vaguely-about-security messages.

> it should be up to people to judge for themselves, not the platform!

If you download an App using MSFT Edge on Windows, it will warn you (MoTW). If you download an App using any browser on macOS, it will warn you (also MoTW). But if you grab apps via the App Store, there's no warning.

Is that also unfair?

While it's been many years since I did hands on end user support, or even worse, support for family friends back in the 9x days, people still have little clue about what they're doing without a big flashing warning sitting in front of them..., which even that sometimes does not work.

Even I'll often choose an extension for Firefox that has more installs. If I'm going to get a SAML decoder, I want the least phishy SAML decoder available.

You get warnings when you install apps from Microsoft Store?

Play Store isn't a web browser.

edge exe/msi downloads, not store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_of_the_Web

That's my point. The apples to apples comparisons are Microsoft Store vs Play Store vs App Store... or Chrome vs Edge vs Safari. NOT Play Store vs Edge and Safari.

Play Store is NOT a web browser. It downloads from one place and one place only.

my bad, i get you now. i still believe warnings should either be everywhere, or nowhere.

It sounds like showing those numbers already conveys the information you find useful; the question isn't whether the number of users is informative, but whether it's reasonable for Google to bucket apps into groups of competitors and then choose a threshold of minimum number of users to avoid actively discouraging additional users. I'm not opposed to the idea of owners of app marketplaces taking a more active step in curating things to try to help users, but this way of doing it seems pretty dubious.

You're going off the premise that I'm an average user who would otherwise stare blankly at a zsh terminal.

Those warnings in the Store aren't meant for you or I.

That's exactly the problem in my opinion; most people will see the warnings and immediately just backtrack without investigating further, and in their shoes, that's not necessarily the wrong decision. I honestly think that having a warning like this isn't a bad idea, but that the heuristic being chosen for when to show it isn't a very good one, and as others have pointed out, it's a metric that benefits larger entrenched players at the expense of smaller competitors. It's hard for me to imagine that this isn't intentional, and that makes it even harder for me to trust that this is actually the correct heuristic to use given the obvious incentives they have for picking it.