Last year, Google blocked over 2.36 million Android apps that violated Google Play policies, as well as over 158,000 developer accounts that attempted to publish such malicious apps, including spyware.
Last year, Google blocked over 2.36 million Android apps that violated Google Play policies, as well as over 158,000 developer accounts that attempted to publish such malicious apps, including spyware.
In addition, the company noted that it had prevented 1.3 million cases of apps gaining excessive or unnecessary access to users' sensitive data.
Also, Google Play Protect, a security feature that is enabled by default on Android devices to flag new threats, detected 13 million new malware outside of Google Play.
For comparison, in 2022 and 2023, the company blocked 1.43 million and 2.28 million malicious apps in the Play Store.
“Today, over 92% of our human malware reviews are powered by AI, allowing us to take faster and more accurate action to prevent malicious apps from appearing on Google Play. This has enabled us to block significantly more malicious apps from accessing Google Play than ever before,” the company said .
Additionally, the company launched a financial fraud prevention pilot that protected 10 million devices from more than 36 million suspicious app installation attempts. The program is already live in 10 countries: Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, and Vietnam. The program will be expanded to other countries over time.
An important step was the introduction of a new “Verified” badge for official government apps and VPN services that meet security requirements. This will allow users to find verified services faster and avoid fakes.
