I found Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify on my home, yet I never even visited their websites on this phone. I never recently installed or visited sus places, I ran a full scan with Kaspersky, found nothing. I disabled "MetaAppInstall" from the settings. I have a Redmi Note 12 Pro. I did some googling and it says for Facebook that it's because of sponsorship. Is this it? You literally can't escape from those apps even by never looking at them because your phone will force them on you? Or is there some other reason?
Edit: I can uninstall them, and I did. It's just that they installed themselves and I don't want them to do it again
You can escape from them by rooting your phone and installing a different OS. If you don't do that, you're at the whim of Xiaomi and its corporate deals.
Installing another OS is not without risk and requires some technical skills though.
what would you reccomend that has a similar enough look to MIUI? I really like the style but goddamn having ads in the file explorer is too much. I ran away from that by using adguard but if your phone will install apps for you...
I don't think you'd necessarily need a new OS to be honest. Once you're rooted, you can just use your root privileges to uninstall any system/non-system app you want using one of several available apps. As for ads, I don't have Xiaomi but you can try these.