Google Deleted More Than 700 Thousand Bad Apps From the Play Store in Just 12 Months

Mobile app developers the world over will tell you that it's much easier to publish an application on Google Play than it is on Apple's App Store. Apple is famous for its closed iOS ecosystem, and the safe keepers of its official store place apps under a great deal of scrutiny before they become available to the general public.

With Android, things are much more relaxed. This doesn't mean that apps that go on Google Play aren't scanned, though. Yesterday, Andrew Ahn, Product Manager at Android's official app store, wrote a blog post about his team's battle with "bad" apps in 2017.

A whopping 700 thousand applications were taken down from Google Play in just twelve months. That's an increase of around 70% compared to the figures recorded at the end of 2016 which goes to show that miscreants are getting more and more interested in Android users. Ahn proudly announced that 99% of the apps that violated Google's policies were rejected before they made it to the Play store which means that no users (apart from the ones downloading applications from untrusted sources) were harmed. He broke down the bad apps into three categories.

The first and biggest one is the copycats. Copycat applications trying to impersonate popular apps are nothing new to the world of mobile software. The developers of such applications copy the icons of the genuine apps and employ other tricks (such as using clever character combinations) to fool their targets into thinking that they're downloading the real thing. The huge amount of search traffic the genuine apps receive also means that the copycats are more likely to be inadvertently installed by unsuspecting users. This, of course, is not that shocking. What is surprising is the fact that in a matter of just one year, Google's security team took down more than a quarter of a million copycat applications.

The second category comprises of apps displaying inappropriate content. As you probably know, Google doesn't allow pornographic applications on Android's official app store, but apparently, some developers aren't afraid to try and sneak them in anyway. Other content deemed as inappropriate includes extreme violence, hate, and illegal activity, and Google bragged about how machine learning helped remove tens of thousands of applications promoting such content.

Ahn called the third and final category Potentially Harmful Applications (or PHAs). It includes the apps designed to conduct SMS fraud, steal login credentials, etc. According to him, there aren't that many PHAs, and he also pointed out that thanks to the introduction of Google Play Protect, the number of PHA installs has dropped by 50%.

The attempts to push bad applications to Google Play got around 100 thousand app developers banned from Android's official store.

So, Google's protecting Android users. They deserve a pat on the back. Or do they?

While the numbers quoted in Andrew Ahn's blog post are certainly impressive, there's no getting away from the fact that malware is still present on Google Play. Security specialists are finding new malicious apps on a regular basis, and worryingly, some of them have significant install numbers. Both Google's security experts and Android users can take certain steps to mitigate the threat.

For the Moutain View giant, the path is clear. The current measures are reducing the number of malicious apps to some extent, but to better protect users, Google should probably think about scrutinizing the applications that appear on the Play store more closely.

As for the users themselves, they need to carefully research every app they're about to install. The rating is a good place to start, though we've seen developers of malicious apps trying to get around this. If all the users that have downloaded a certain application have had an unpleasant experience with it, however, at least some of them are bound to write a negative review. Make sure you take a look at what other people are saying before you tap the Install button.