Risks of downloading apps and widgets from google store

[dantana2000]

I'm pretty new to android. I went into the google apps store to download some apps and widgets. When I went to install nearly all of them had disclaimers that I would be granting the app network access, access to my contacts, access to send messages, etc, etc. I could see that many peoe downloaded these and gave them positive feedback. It's just that alot of those things sound real scarey and will do all kinds of bad things to my phone. I'm assuming that all that sounds worse than it actually is, I just want to make sure.