Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
Google Play Store

Google today revealed the details of Google Play’s efforts to protect Android users with its teams of engineers, policy experts, product managers, and operations professionals that monitor the play store for misleading, inappropriate, or harmful apps. The tech giant claims to have used advanced machine learning models and techniques to detect bad apps with behaviors like impersonation, inappropriate content, and malware to eradicate over 700,000 apps and 100,000 developers in 2017.The numbers indicate a 70% rise as compared to 2016.The company also claims that the odds of getting malware are 10 times lower via Google Play than if you install apps from outside sources.

The stats reveal that the number of bad apps removed grew faster than the total number of available apps in the store, which makes sense if you take into account the next statistic Google revealed today: “99 percent of apps with abusive content were identified and rejected before anyone could install them in 2017.”

Google also gave three examples of malicious/bad apps it removed in 2017:

1.Impersonation/Copycats:

Google, on its Android Developers Blog, explains that ‘impersonators’ or ‘copycats’ are the most common alert signal for removing apps from Google Play. These developers deceive users by impersonating famous apps since those titles get a lot of search traffic for particular keywords. These apps are snuck into the Play Store through deceptive methods like – by the use of confusing Unicode characters or hiding impersonating app icons in a different locale. In 2017, Google took down more than a quarter of a million copycat apps- which is a huge number!

2.Inappropriate content:

Applications that contain or promote explicit content such as pornography, extreme violence, hate, and illegal activities are not permitted. The improved machine learning models check through massive amounts of incoming app submissions and flag them for potential violations, helping human reviewers to detect and block harmful apps. In the year 2017, Google took down tens of thousands of apps with inappropriate content.

3.Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs)/ Malware:

Another red flag for Google is the presence of Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs)/Malware that can cause harm to device users. Malware that can harm people or their devices are nothing but the apps that conduct SMS fraud, act as trojans, or phish users’ information. Though these apps are less in volume but finding these bad apps is non-trivial as the malicious developers go the extra mile to make their app look as legitimate as possible. Google says it reduced the rate of PHA installs in 2017 via Google Play Protect – Google’s malware scanning feature – at I/O 2017 as compared to 2016.

Google believes that-“While the majority of developers have their audience’s best interest at heart, some bad applications and malicious developers attempt to escape detection and enter the Play Store to put people and their devices in harm’s way since the massive scale and the global reach of Google Play make the platform a target for bad actors.” Indeed, despite the record-high take downs of bad apps and malicious developers, many still evaded Google Play’s security-the worst part!

For the various bad apps that slip through, Google says it takes them “extremely seriously”, and will continue to innovate their capabilities to better detect and protect against abusive apps and the bad actors behind them.

Let’s see what Google has got next to fight these bad actors in 2018!