Malicious apps are a grueling reality for any app store, and Google has felt the sting of that for years. While malicious actors are still able to post their apps to the Play Store, Google is working overtime to keep that from happening. According to a blog post, Google blocked over a million bad apps from being posted to the Play Store last year.
It’s a tough job protecting billions of users from malicious apps. There are thousands, if not millions of Publishers who post their apps to the Play Store every day. A small amount of them are malicious, and they employ ingenious ways of flying under the radar. This is what makes them such a big threat.
But, Google blocked over a million bad apps last year
It’s not hard finding malicious apps that will scam you or steal your data. However, it doesn’t mean that Google is sitting by and letting this happen. The company employs a ton of measures to keep as many malicious apps off of the Play Store as possible.
According to a blog post straight from Google, the company was able to prevent about 1.43 million policy-violating apps from being published to the Play Store last year. That pales in comparison to the number of apps already on the Play Store, but it’s a substantial number nonetheless. These are all apps that blatantly violate Google’s security measures. So, they are definitely bad news.
Google didn’t only ban the apps, but the companies publishing the apps. The blog post said that it banned over 173,000 accounts that could potentially post malicious apps. That’s definitely a hefty amount of accounts, and that prevented millions more applications from potentially being published.
With all of these security measures being implemented, Google estimated that it prevented over $2 billion in fraudulent transactions. That’s a hefty amount, and most people can’t deny that they themselves were saved from a potential scam.
This goes beyond money, as over the past 3 years, Google prevented over 500,000 apps from accessing sensitive information on your device. This includes information like your passwords, location, banking information, Etc.
Google is definitely in an ongoing war against malicious apps; as are Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and other app publishers. While the threat is still out there, it’s nice to know that companies are still working to stave off future attacks.