Google said it had banned 1.75 million apps from the Play Store in 2025 that violated the platform’s rules. The company also announced a major crackdown on review fraud and attempts to access user data.
Google said it had banned 1.75 million apps from the Play Store in 2025 that violated the platform’s rules. The company also announced a major crackdown on review fraud and attempts to access user data.
According to Engadget, Google attributes the result to its increased use of automated reviews and AI-based tools that «weed out» suspicious publications before they hit the store. The company says that each app goes through thousands of security checks and continues to re-check after publication to catch risky behavior more quickly.
Separately, Google reported on its fight against rating manipulation. In 2025, the company blocked 160 million spam ratings and reviews and said that this helped stop review bombing attacks, which can lower the average rating of an app by about half a star. Another indicator from the report concerns privacy: Google said that it stopped 255 thousand apps from gaining excessive access to sensitive user data, for example through unnecessary permissions.
Google also said it had banned about 80,000 developer accounts that tried to publish malicious or fraudulent apps. In parallel, Play Protect, Android’s built-in protection, the company estimates, has detected more than 27 million new malicious apps outside the Play Store and blocked or stopped them from launching. Separately, Google said it had blocked 266 million risky attempts to install apps «bypassing the store» and covered 2.8 billion devices in 185 markets with enhanced anti-fraud protection.
A year ago, Google cited an even higher number of blocked publications, and now claims that some attackers have begun to avoid the Play Store and shift their activity to installing from alternative sources. Against this background, the company continues to publicly justify store fees with investments in security, while in the EU the Play Store is under pressure from regulators due to requirements for competition and alternative payment mechanisms.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how the human rights organization Tech Transparency Project discovered a number of Russian and Chinese applications from companies under sanctions in the Apple and Google stores .
