It's also impossible to find good apps. The store has flags indicating whether an app uses in-app purchases or ads, and knows the file size of apps (which is a

It's also impossible to find good apps. The store has flags indicating whether an app uses in-app purchases or ads, and knows the file size of apps (which is a good proxy of how much data-collecting bloatware is inside). It doesn't let you easily see the size before installing and doesn't let you search by any of these criteria. So if you wanted to publish a high quality, free, ad-free app, you would immediately be crowded out by the apps that can spend money on ads and SEO because they're full of crap, and your potential users have no chance of finding your app. Given how easy this would be to implement, it seems obvious that this is an intentional, user-hostile choice because Google doesn't profit off these apps.