No one cares of infecting Linux distros. That won't help in gaining the personal information a hacker requires. Also Android is not fully Linux-compliant. It has other third-party code.
Instead, infecting a mobile phone would lead to compromising of sensitive user information including credit-card information. Those apps successfully exploited the OS to compromise the IMEI numbers of the handsets. If they were allowed to run further, only God knows, what other information they could've exploited.