After 11 years of its launch, the number of Android users has reached over 2.5 billion. There are over 2.8 million apps on the Play Store. Since Android is such a big plateform it is very easy to target it with malicious apps. The number of suspicious apps in the Play Store is increasing daily. So, to protect Play Store from these apps, Google had created the “Google play protect” service. According to Google, the Google Play Protect is already scanning billions of apps every day. But it seems that this effort is not enough to secure Play store, so Google has collaborated with three internet security providing companies. Google is calling this collaboration “App Defense Alliance”.
The App Defense Alliance is a collaboration between Google, ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium. Their aim is to quickly find Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs)
and take the appropriate action to protect users.
The partners of App Defence Alliance can ask Google Play Protect to scan a suspicious app. The Google Play Protect service will scan the app and send the data directly to the partner. This direct communication also allows Google Play Protect to send requests to the partner’s scanner services and receive results from the partner’s scanning engines. This will generate new app risk intelligence as apps are being queued to publish. Partners will analyze that dataset and act as another, vital set of eyes prior to an app going live on the Play Store.