USER IS THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE SECURITY CHAIN
So, to protect against harmful apps, you must strengthen yourself on how they tend to take advantage of the User's unawareness.
By experience and an open mind to learn about cyber space security, YOU will become the best judge to decide which apps are safe. This will be always better than relying on any curated lists or whatsoever.
You can't really look into the code and guard yourself against the technical glitches(which the Playstore will do by itself). All you can do is it not fall for the stuff that is directed on taking advantage of the user, which are difficult for programs to scan and capture, because it's dependent on YOU.
As a quick guide, you may think of these for taking decision:
- Stick to Playstore. New users(until you know what you are doing) should never download apps from anywhere else, whatever may be the reason. If the reason is so strong that you want to go outside Playstore, then that is a very clear indication that you are going somewhere, not to be gone, and will surely end up with malware.
- Is the app asking for permissions only for what it wants to do? You may find that for the task that the app accomplishes, there's no need to access contacts data, but it still asks for that permission.
- If it is an open source app, that might be a good chance to move forward with it, although nothing can be guaranteed.
- The way the app description is written on the play store. If they are not really explaining the permissions and what they accomplish clearly, but are just trying to attract users, well that may not be a good one.
- The purpose of the app itself: It should be trying to do something that you can believe and not something magical which it claims only it can do.
A lot more...