Hi,
I just created this account as II felt that I could help in this matter. I am an IT consultant with 30 years in internet security, software development and I work, or have worked, for some of the top computer firms in the world at senior level. In other words, I know my stuff.
I only mention the above in order to try and reassure the worried OP that she most likely has nothing to be worried about.
It is actually very common for old deleted apps to reappear in the Play Store on an Android phone. It happens all the time. It happens to tens of millions of people. Probably hundreds of millions of people.
Before I started writing this I checked my own Android phone and I have loads of old deleted apps in my Play Store account that I know that I have, several times, deleted from All Apps and My Apps repeatedly. But they keep coming back.
Why do they keep coming back?
The reality is that there are a number of reasons why these apps could have reappeared on the phone. The software itself is not perfect. It suffers from what are known as glitches. Some would argue that it is very buggy. It is far from perfect.
There are known synchronisation issues between an individual's Play Store Account and their Google Account. When you re-synch your phone, as most Android phones are configured to do daily or weekly, errors in the synchronisation process can upload or download wrong, out of date or deleted information - this includes information about what apps are on your phone.
This is very common.
I had a situation last year when I was setting up a completely new Android phone. I synched the phone with my Google account, and hence also with my Play Store account, and the phone began downloading my contacts, emails & photos to my phone.
My heart skipped several beats when a current photograph of someone I dated 12 years ago, and who I have not talked to or even seen in that time and have no interest in seeing ever again, suddenly appeared on my phone. (For a moment I had a paranoid thought of how did this person track me.). That information was NOT anywhere in my Google account. It was not, obviously, on my brand new phone either.
How did this happen?
Well, somewhere in Google's databases they have a load of info on me as I have had a gmail email account from day one. They know that I used to know that person and, without any prompting from me, decided to add the contact details of someone from my past - along with the contact details of several other people I worked with years ago - to my new phone.
As an IT profession I have read numerous posts on IT forums, for many years now, from software developers angsting over why deleted apps keep reappearing and whether it is possible to find a way to stop it happening.
The issues that I mentioned above are some, but not all, of the common reasons. But there is another possible reason.
Google makes a huge amount of money via apps so they want as many apps as possible on your phone - especially the ones which help make Google a lot of money by being able to track your personal information. Dating apps are amongst the most lucrative as they often require very detailed personal information from you - along with you giving them a load of permissions on your phone when you install them - when you join up. This information is sold to companies for marketing purposes.
How many people on here have ever read the full permission agreement for apps like POF, Tinder, etc, when you install them? Any one? No, of course not. Probably 99.9% of people just click on OK and have no idea what personal information about themselves they are agreeing to sharing.
People have no idea what information they have given to the likes of Apple and Google via their smartphones. No idea at all. And no idea of how those companies can link together who you know, where you go and what things you like simply by installing a few seemingly innocent apps.
Via this Google and Apple have become two of the richest companies on the planet.
So it is in their interests to keep 'accidentally' pushing apps back onto our phones via glitches and bugs - especially, as I mentioned above, those very lucrative dating apps where we not only give loads of really personal info but also now give our photos. (Yes, we are all being tracked online by our photos as well and, increasingly, as many of the new app agreements include allowing companies to keep a record of our voices, by our voices. ).
I suspect that the OP's partner has simply had some kind of sychronisation glitch between his Play Store and Google Accounts. He may even have reset his phone at some point. His Google Account may have become corrupted or lost and Google simply restored it from a backup without him ever knowing there was anything wrong - but the backup included apps from months back. There are too many possible technological reasons why this has happened. As I said, this is something that is happening to millions and millions of people.
Whilst dating apps and smartphones are allowing an awful lot of people to cheat on their partners the other side of the coin is that this same technology is, for some of the above innocent reasons, leading to perfectly happy relationships breaking up.
Regarding the SPAM emails - someone said that you have to look at a site about viagra or s*x in order to get SPAM emails about them. This is COMPLETE RUBBISH and should be completely ignored.
There are thousands of firms based in places like Russia, China, India and elsewhere sending out BILLIONS of SPAM emails targetting EACH AND EVERY SINGLE EMAIL ADDRESS on the planet daily. Every single one of us has such SPAM emails for pron, viagra, whatever, sent to us daily but the VAST majority of it is intercepted by the routers and servers that work on the internet backbone and at your internet service provider.
I have an 89 year old neighbour who only ever uses the internet to look at who has died locally, the football results and videos of passenger aircraft. He wonders why he gets emails asking him to go to s*x sites or for viagra. His 82 year old wife uses her ipad to order knitting supplies online and to play Hay Day - she is amused to get emails for viagra and asking her to view pron sites. Should they both divorce as clearly merely receiving these SPAM emails means that they are lying to each other about what websites they visit?
I hope this helps. Best wishes in your relationship OP.