Google took down over 700,000 bad Android apps in 2017

Google’s varied safeguards designed to stop malicious apps from reaching humanoid users LED to the removal of over 700,000 apps from the Google Play Store in 2017, the corporate aforementioned nowadays. That’s a seventy p.c increase over the overall removals in 2016. “Not solely did we have a tendency to take away additional unhealthy apps, we have a tendency to were able to establish and action against them earlier,” Google Play product manager Saint Andrew Ahn wrote in an exceedingly journal post. “99 p.c of apps with abusive contents were known and rejected before anyone might install them.”

Google attributes this success to its improved ability to sight abuse “through new machine learning models and techniques.”


Copycat apps designed to fit in style mainstays stay a well-liked methodology of attempting to deceive users, in line with Ahn. Google removed over 1 / 4 of 1,000,000 of those impersonating apps last year. the corporate additionally says it unbroken “tens of thousands” of apps with inappropriate content (pornography, extreme violence, hate, and ineligible activities) out of the Play Store. Machine learning plays a key role here in serving to human reviewers keep a watch out for unhealthy apps and malicious developers.

“Potentially harmful applications” (PHAs) ar apps that commit to phish users’ personal info, act as a computer virus for malware, or commit SMS fraud by firing texts while not a user’s data. “While little in volume, PHAs cause a threat to humanoid users and that we invest heavily to keep them out of the Play Store,” Ahn said.

Last year, Google place all of its malware scanning and detection technologies underneath the umbrella of Google Play defend. The humanoid OS mechanically performs scans on put in applications to explore for something that’s out of place, and users may also manually trigger scans of their humanoid smartphones right within the updates section. (I’ve finally managed to prevent hit this button once checking for brand new versions of apps, however it took a while.)

Still, unhealthy apps do often slip through Google’s defenses. In August, Google discovered and kicked out thirty apps that were on the QT exploitation the devices they were put in on to perform DDoS attacks. simply earlier this month, the corporate removed sixty games from the Play Store — a number of them meant for youngsters — that were found to show sexy ads. Google says it'll still upgrade its ways and machine learning models against unhealthy actors attempting to trick customers with apps that violate its policies. Those efforts so appear to be paying off in serving to Android’s security flip a corner.