I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
While I’m all for using an ad-blocker, I don’t think you have to worry too much about Google Ads containing malware, particularly if you don’t click through.
AFAIK Google has pretty strict restrictions around the type and format of ads they will push and ad campaigns have to get approval before being activated.
So while I do strongly feel that everyone should be using an ad-blocker, I don’t think malicious ads are of particular concern coming from Google’s ad platform, on an android device.
I’m not English native and I often see Google ads in my language. Many of them are of very low quality and some ads connect to phishing links, weird apps or cover contents. I don’t think Google strictly restrict them…