Searching for exact app names in the Play Store

Pffft, the young generation, not hardened by the 6 different download buttons on a torrent search engine... /s

This, but unironically. How can you be so blind to click on something called Zoho, when RealVNC (the thing you searched for) is right below it?
- Google play shouldn't confuse users just because some company pays more for ads

Clearly many of the commenters here have not supported average smartphone users enough to know how they will blindly click the first thing that looks anything like what they think the technician is asking them to click. Remember, the average person does not have a laptop or desktop computer, they only have a phone (and only the one because they probably traded their old phone in with the carrier for a pittance when they got their current one), and they often do not have internet service at home and simply rely on mobile data from their unlimited data plan.

Is that really the average user? Especially not having internet service at home? I can reluctantly but relatively easily believe the "no computer" bit but, average or not, I don't think I know anyone without some kind of non-mobile Internet.
- Nobody in my wife's family has a laptop. Not a single person. They are tech illiterate to the point where I'm not sure they know how to use a keyboard.
  That's probably not the average user either, but they certainly help to set the average as low as it truly is...
- To this average person, they have an unlimited plan because that's what they sell you in the carrier store, and they go do a quick cost benefit and go "nah I don't need to pay for another internet plan for my home when I have unlimited data on my phone" Mobile data has gotten good enough and cheap enough that they don't have to care really.
  I agree its very hard for us in tech to imagine. I had a similar discussion with one of my colleagues in IT who was in a similar state of disbelief (in this case it was a person who was recently fired who had been with the company for over 25 years and used his work email for a bunch of personal accounts because he "doesn't have a personal email" a couple of us pointed out some of the thought processes and cost/benefit analysis one might make that can lead to that point)
This was the thought process I had after the episode. I pictured the average user, blissfully installing apps they didn't search for, before trying again and installing what they needed. I bet a lot of those people leave such apps installed after the fact. And I don't recall the current broadcast behavior but some time ago it was possible to wake up without the user starting the app and then you could do work on the user's device. Such as pestering then with notifications, sucking up data, and so on.
- I bet a lot of those people leave such apps installed after the fact.
  The fun part is once an app is installed, it tends to stay installed for a very long time, and often will even follow them to new phones because what does your phone helpfully offer to do when you first set it up? It asks if you want to transfer all of your data to it. So it transfers everything, including all of your installed apps. I've uninstalled flashlight apps from back when phones didn't have such functionality consistently built in
I've bee the using smartphones my entire life and I've fallen for this bullshit. I've instinctively pressed the first install button because my search was hyper specific, I just assumed it wouid be the first result.
But, of course it was an ad. Fucking Google.
It's been ages since i touched frontend but there's ways to stop the page moving as it loads and i swear it's not done intentionally since it generates clicks.

That's a fucking Google, an advertising company, for you.

No, fuck that. The ads being listed before rhe first result are intended to cause people to misclick. That isn't all on the user.
Don't excuse predatory business practices.
Of course it's user error. However a system makes it easier or harder to achieve a task or make errors. You say it's clearly not the app that was asked for. I see two equally sized icons of nearly identical color, two equally sized Install buttons if the same color. The first one being the wrong one. And this is after looking for an exact app name. I think we don't need a focus group to show this drives clicks away from the searched app and to the ad. In fact we can be reasonably sure Google's research drove the decision to create this UX. In a slightly saner timeline I'd have expected the ad to not have an Install button on it or at the very least to not use the prominent button color. 😒 BTW I didn't downvote.
A few months ago I needed to install Google home for something Chromecast related, so I quickly searched the play store and installed it. Loaded it up and I see an ad, what the hell. App opens and I realise it isn't Google Home, it's something made to trick me into thinking it was when I wasn't paying attention.
Google is letting their ads steal their own users from them.
- That's actually pretty funny

They recently changed it so that the search bar no longer appears by default, and you have to go to the search tab just to get to it. Fuck heads.

You can double click the search button at the bottom to start a search
That's just like apple then. Lame

Not to say that your relative is at fault, but this might also be a good opportunity to teach them about the font scaling and other visual accessibility settings in Android.

Yeah I hate this about the play store. I am so used to the first result being what I searched for that whenever I go install an app (once every couple months) I just click on the first one and then have to go back. I never use the install button in the search results because I always check the app descriprion and reviews but it is still annoying as all fuck.

Even Google maps does this! I accidentally drove 45 minutes out of the way because I clicked the first result because of course that should be the closest store. Google can fuck right off with these sponsored results
- I tried to help someone buy some tickets to a local attraction yesterday. After googling it the first 5 results were ads and I had to scroll down to the official ticket store. Utter insanity

Just as a PSA:
\ For things only on PlayStore use Aurora Store or other apk downloaders like APKMirror/APKPure.

For everything else ofc Droid-ify, Obtanium, F-Droid/G-Droid, Neo Store, Aurora Droid, etc.

Do you trust APKMirror and APKPure? I always thought they were a bit shady.
- I mean, not really but Androids are fairly safe devices.
  \ Why I use them (not often) however is that Play Store doesn't seem that much controlled.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.gaurav.avnc/

Interesting. I typically go for bVNC when I need a FOSS VNC client, but AVNC's UI looks nicer.
I love it when the unarguably better option is FOSS

My dad nearly installed a virus on my computer once when installing skype because he just went for the first search result

That could be really bad. At least on Android there is sandboxing and permissions.

ads with install buttons always are traps. and traps are always bad (except snmp traps, those are good but unreliable)

same way ads at download pages stating "proceed to download" are traps.

also ads at search result pages stating " 1 2 3 4 .. next" are traps too.

for the "sponsored" note: there is no boundary here that makes it really clear for what that 'sponsored' is meant for. without any boundary it could be for something above it, below it, on the side or maybe even something that opens when you click on "sponsored" itself (seen it this way once). it could be for an ad that just failed to load (noticed the free space above that "sponsored" text? maybe the ad loads a bit later just to shift the real contents down so you "accidently" click on the ad that loads intentionally late for this very accident to be likely to happen?) if you use adblockers - which you should do for security reasons anyway - then you'll see "sponsored" or "advertising" often even without the ad it was meant for after full load of the page. so a single "sponsored" without a clear boundary showing what would be that sponsored content, does not state anything to be an ad, it is purely meaningless and the lack of such boundary always is intentional to distract the user from what he wanted and trap him somehow.

a clear thumbs-down for 'zoho assist' from me here just for paying for (or trying out for free or such) such an advertising type.

And in most cases ads simply beeing ads are traps too. by the very concept of ads.

around 80 % of all things i actually still wanted after i bought them were recommendations by people i met in person. 15 % are things recommended by real persons i met on the internet. around 5% are things i bought without it beeing recommded by anyone (not even an ad) things i still wanted after i bought it due to an ad are nearly not existant. ok, i have stopped viewing television in 1997, have a sticker at my postbox that forbids to throw ads in (works where i live), use dns entries to remove most ads in my network, use browsers/extension that remove most crapjunkwastelitterrubbishads and skip webpages that still show too many ads or too offensive cookieterrorbanners. i use google search only sometimes for comparison of results, but near to zero for actual searching. i feel safe to say i am not that much distracted by ads. (however open source projects and authors do get money from me on a monthly basis, where i want to support them, either direct lly sent from my bank account or indirect).

for me personally an ad just saying "you might like this" drives me away from that product, if it needs or wants an ad, i don't want it, even more so the more it states how difficult and horrible my life would be without the product or how easy it'll be with it, go away ad-needing products, get recommended personally by those who actually use it, not by those who want to sell it. period. there is no better ad than true recommendation and its also free, no marketing monkey needs to get payed for bs, only an actually good product is needed... and there we go what types of products actually need ads...

once in my life i discovered a product that i first explicitly not bought for a decade because of the awful ad for it, but bought it another decade later by an absentminded accident and found it to be a good product despite its awful ad. then they increased packaging/reduced the product within to cover up a price increase in trade of more waste production, so i abandoned that product again and found something cheaper more eco friendly instead, yes, the cheaper one is really not as good, but i feel better with it and especially less betrayed by the vendor, so the eco one is the better one alltogether. and also i think its better to buy products where you don't see ads for cause this behaviour could actually fix this advertising storm in the long run, so in this way its the better choice to buy products that don't have ads for it.

again:

An ad with an install button is always a trap, even more so when the real install follows a single misclick on it. il'd say it would be quite fair to downvote/zerostars an app for how foulish-sneaky it was positioned in the search results if it is shown like an actual result with a f'ing install button. as its advertising type is always also part of the brand and the product itself. maybe make a sports out of that, klick the clickbait install buttons only to downvote the app for beeing intrusive and deinstall it again without even starting the app once, just to train advertisers to do it right instead of wrong next time. maybe. but for security reasons better don't do that (at least not with a device with sensitive data on it)

please do not blame users to fall for ads. advertising industry now had centuries to learn to trap users and literally thousands or millions of marketing guys, designers, psycologists, neurologists or whatever only to learn and establish new abusive ways to distract and trap users. but a user only has his own lifespan to counteract that and learn to avoid those manipulations, and he also has to do other important stuff in his life too.

please don't blame users for beeing humans. blame the industry where they are intentionally abusive, inhumane and/or counterproductive.

Must have something to do with the setting on my phone, I have seen what you are showing before

Oh this looks closer to what I recall seeing some time ago. I don't visit the Play Store frequently. It could be regional, or user group difference, or perhaps just older/newer version.
Same

Now squint just a bit. That's how everyone without perfect vision sees it, and that's a huge proportion of people.
Also, this is how other results appear:
No Install buttons.
E: Not sure why this image doesn't show but in any case, app results in lists don't have Install buttons. Hm apparently it only doesn't show on mobile.
- The screenshot you are showing is scrolled down the page past "More results". What you are showing is after all of the actual search results (which for me is just the app and no ad).
As someone who's seeing this Play Store search result page for the first time, I also find it massively confusing.
Frankly, it looks like just the description page of RealVNC with an info box for "Zoho Assist" at the top (which might be the team that develops RealVNC?), and for some reason there's also two install-buttons.
You don't have a chance to realize that it's a list of search results, because there's practically no repeating UI elements.
Aside from the sponsored app at the top (which I also don't find clearly labeled; that "Sponsored" could just be a generic heading above everything), I don't even assume malicious intent from Google here.
Presumably, they made the RealVNC entry big, because they don't want you falling for scam apps. But it is absolutely not helpful in this case.

Don't use the google play store, it is quite literally malware