You can attribute this to less trust, or more piracy, more likely both.

In part because of this, Play Store is less funded, and less regulated and has way more malware than the App Store.

Also, despite 13% of known app installs come outside the Play Store, 33% of known malware comes outside the Play Store, clearly confirming that non-Play Store installs are way more likely to be malware than Play Store apps.

So in short, Play Stores gets way less sales, gets way more malware, and there's EVEN MORE malware outside the Play Store.

The situation is not fine at all. All of the effects I mentioned are exhibited by Android's ecosystem.

Of course, we probably have different tolerance for what "fine" is. Maybe you don't care that developers do several times less sales per user on Android than on iOS. Maybe you don't care about the malware, and think you can teach everyone you care about to just "be careful" or something.

But if Android is fine, then Android is all yours. It's the majority of phones. So use that. Why do we HAVE to destroy everything that's different and make it like the rest? Why should iOS be Android? Let Apple do Apple. They're clearly doing something right if their parameters are way better than the Play Store.

I switched to an iphone but I still keep an android phone around to run a couple of sideload only apps which violate the App Store and Google Play guidelines like the app that loads the hack payload on to my Nintendo switch on boot.