Android SDKs themselves can be leaky and are incredibly widespread, this is a clear flaw in mobile appsec and not that well known.

That said basically everything benefits from the sun shining in on it. F-Droid alerts you to anything dodgy under the hood, has reproducible builds[1] and in general has none of the complete shitshow that is playstore.

In my 5EYES country Google's playstore has to secretly insert malware if the government wants it and there's no way for the end user to tell if that's the case.

Tell me a common use for a mobile app and we can compare what is available on both play store and f-droid.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/

I’m more pointing out how it’s not a silver bullet (and how a silver bullet for app privacy doesn’t exist); nothing is perfect and f-droid is no exception, even if it is better than Play Store. Nothing is stopping an app from uploading user data for a good purpose then selling it to third parties.

> nothing is perfect and f-droid is no exception, even if it is better than Play Store

Not wearing a seatbelt isn't perfect, and yet we all still do it :)

> Not wearing a seatbelt isn't perfect, and yet we all still do it :)

Provably false.