&gt; ...it must be noted that this isn&#x27;t a guarantee of security.<p>Yes, and if a nation-state is after <i>you</i>, you almost certainly don&#x27;t have the OPSEC discipline required to keep your computing devices secure. Security isn&#x27;t binary, it&#x27;s a gradient. Ever more secure devices require ever higher costs, whether they be monetary costs, lost time, or procedural complications.<p>&gt; A quick search of &#x27;Google Play malware&#x27; returns many results from 2016...<p>And even a <i>brief</i> dig into the details of those &quot;malware&quot; reports reveals that -if the software was distributed and installed through the Play Store, and the Android device user <i>did not</i> have &quot;Allow installation from unknown software sources&quot; checked- all that pretty much <i>all</i> of that &quot;malware&quot; does is <i>exactly what the permissions it requests permits it to do</i>. [0]<p>Protip: If the software asks for permission to read your contacts, location information, and system log data, don&#x27;t be surprised if it exfiltrates that information via the pretty-much-always-on Internet connection that&#x27;s built into the device it&#x27;s running on. :)<p>The fact of the matter is that Google is <i>rather</i> good at software security.<p>&gt; ...but the only certainty that using Google&#x27;s store brings is that you must have a first-party relationship with Google to use his app.<p>Not to be an ass, but you either haven&#x27;t read or haven&#x27;t understood either the <i>technical</i> aspects of what the Play Store gives you, or the target audience for Whisper Systems&#x27;s software.<p>[0] Vulnerabilities like stagefright are excepted from this list because they are <i>vanishingly</i> rare. I challenge <i>you</i> to find another <i>actual</i> Android sandbox escape. :)