Having cleaned a bunch of old folks phones in the past years this is far more common than we ”advanced” users think. It often starts with clicking an advert or some spam mail or message from (infected) friend, which to them, looks absolutely legit. Then the installed app spams the user with notifications to install more ”PDF readers”, ”phone cleanup apps” and whatnot. In best case these just flood the user with ads but just as easily can do more malicious stuff.
After some schooling (”never click anything that is offered to you” etc.) and putting up defencew like AdGuard (system level) the instances of ”my phone is slow”, ”what does this message mean” etc. have radically decreased. Apple devices have their own issues but this kind of troubles are next to non-existent there.
Having cleaned a bunch of old folks phones in the past years this is far more common than we ”advanced” users think. It often starts with clicking an advert or some spam mail or message from (infected) friend, which to them, looks absolutely legit. Then the installed app spams the user with notifications to install more ”PDF readers”, ”phone cleanup apps” and whatnot. In best case these just flood the user with ads but just as easily can do more malicious stuff.
After some schooling (”never click anything that is offered to you” etc.) and putting up defencew like AdGuard (system level) the instances of ”my phone is slow”, ”what does this message mean” etc. have radically decreased. Apple devices have their own issues but this kind of troubles are next to non-existent there.