Yeah, I see this mentality a lot on HN (and kinda everywhere for that matter). "Anyone who disagrees with me is evil, and must therefore have evil motives for everything they're doing. The reasonable/innocent explanation they give for why they're doing this must actually be a front for this other shadowy, nefarious motivation that I just made up on the spot, because surely nobody ever does bad things for good reasons. Certainly not those evil people who disagree with me!"
I hate having to defend Google here, because I think this is genuinely a terrible, freedom-destroying move, but malware on Android is a real problem (especially in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, where they're rolling this out initially) and this probably will do a lot to solve it. I'm just categorically against the whole idea of taking away the freedom of mentally sound adults "for their own good" regardless of whether it works or not, and this particular case is especially maddening because I'm one of those adults whose freedom is being destroyed.
If they really care about scams, they could remove all these casino-like games on the playstore. But they aren't going to do that because a huge chunk of the playstore revenue comes from those scam games.
If it's really a problem they care about, here's some priorities. (And I'd personally happy if they cared as I have some family members who got scammed by those)
But how else should Google and their users react? Insist on offering a platform with far more abuse while subjecting users to worse user experiences and websites to more attacks… in the name of abstract freedom?