I think the impulse for an OS vendor to try to make such mistakes impossible is about as wrong as selling knives dull so people can't hurt themselves. A knife that can't cut its user is useless as a knife.

This kind of comment is frequently made on HN and elsewhere. However, more than a few "elderly parents" are as computer-sophisticated as their grown children. A safe bet it's not rare to be exchanging ideas with an elderly person sophisticated enough to make comments on HN.

AFAIK there's no shortage of careless, uninformed, non-elderly individuals who get scammed into doing stupid things. Age is only one possible factor out of many contributing to scam vulnerability. And let us not forget that youthful, well-trained professional IT workers, developers and software engineers are not immune to scams via misunderstanding elements of the systems or processes they supervise.

"Ageism" is a word as ugly as what it signifies.

Of course this isn’t true, the play store, and yes even the apple App Store to a lesser extent, is riddled with malware.

But what this demonstrates is that, clearly, Google doesn’t care too much about security or safety. It’s a pretense, not a goal. If it was a goal, they’d dump money into fixing the play store, but they won’t and they don’t.

So, we should be highly skeptical when they say something is for “safety” and “security”. At this point, it’s a lot like saying something is for “national security”.

That radius would be negligible should the things that must remain secret remain offline.

But no, that's a luddite thing to even think about in an all-connected ever-online world where even wiping one's ass is done via of a swarm of dedicated apps.

On the other hand, there has always been a way to extract secrets from a granny via a mere voice call, so no amount of dumbing it down would really help.