Yesterday my phone started installing apps on its own

A couple of questions: have you been installing apps from sources other than the big app stores (i.e. Play Store and Amazon)? If so there's a fair chance that the problem is one of the apps you installed that way - it's sadly not unknown for unscrupulous individuals to insert adware or worse into apps they offer on download sites (often having ripped the app off from the actual developer). If you can identify which apps are the cause then deleting them will make it go away.

You could try installing an app called Addons Detector from the Play Store, running a scan with that then looking in the "Addons" report for anything with "push notifications". That's an old technology that adware used to use for doing this type of thing - banned from the Play Store, but you may still find it in apps from other sources. That would almost be a best case, since this is easy to deal with by just deleting the app.

Otherwise it might be worth running a malware scan, e.g. with MalwareBytes (also from the Play Store) to see whether it can identify the source.

The worst case is that some recent adware can install itself to /system on vulnerable phones, making it very hard to get rid of (don't bother with a factory reset in that case - that will erase your data but won't affect that type of adware). If you identify a source but can't uninstall it ask for further advice, and tell us what phone model you have (as you might have to reinstall your operating system to get rid of one of those things). But hopefully that won't be needed.

I'm assuming that these things are interrupting general activities on the phone. If it's just when using a browser than clear the browser cache, as it might just be the browser hijacked by an ad script (and publishers wonder why mobile advertising has a bad image...).

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Yesterday my phone started installing apps on its own