Yes, that's very much the point of an official, curated application store. Especially when you can sideload applications or use third-party store, the official first-party store being loose and un-trustable makes it not very useful.

> The ultimate responsibility of what you run on your computers lies with you

Most users have absolutely no sense of IT responsibility, and barely even understand how the thing is supposed to work.

> Pushing the responsibility to Google is utterly unfair

Not really. It's their store, branded by themselves. To regular users, they're the trusted authority/overseer.

(...)

> The ultimate responsibility of what you run on your computers lies with you, (...)

This touches on something that has been nipping at my brain lately. There seems to be a widespread assumption among many developers that end users need to be more educated about technology, that it is not the developers who need to make these things simpler to use, but end users who need to understand the underlying system better. In other words, that the general public needs to catch up to technology instead of technology being more usable for the general public.

I think that is very wrong headed.

> Now if only people would read those warnings and think for a bit before clicking 'ok'.

Well, it only tells you it wants to read your address book, not that it wants to read your address book so it can spam all your friends (as an example). Joe Somebody wouldn't be stupid to allow a wallpaper app to read his address book if he was under the assumption that the app would just use that data to let him email nice wallpapers to friends.

> This is analogous to people receiving an email that instructs them to open a malware attachment.

Only if every app the user installs requires following email instructions and opening an attachment, and that's the point. There is little to discern the malicious permissions from the beneficial ones unless you are intimate with how the app is supposed to work. This is why a higher, more knowledgeable authority should at least give apps some level of review.