Play Store: Google removed 700,000 malicious apps in 2017!

As explained by Product Manager Andrew Ahn Google Play store, inside a short press release “toIn 2017, we removed over 700,000 apps that violated Google Play Store policies; that’s 70% more than in 2016″. While these numbers may sound alarming, they are actually quite encouraging for Google’s security teams. As Andrew Ahn points out, “99% of apps with abusive content are detected and removed before users install them”.

Play Store: Google removed 70% more malicious apps compared to 2016!

Over the past year, Google has greatly improved its security barriers. “We have made significant improvements in our detection systems thanks to machine learning”, says Andrew Ahn. The man refers first of all to the famous artificial intelligence that sorts, scans and analyzes all the apps of the Google Play Store. This artificial intelligence can evolve according to its own experiences.

In the rest of his blog post, Andrew Anh gives some examples of malicious apps being deleted from the Google Play Store. Product Manager classifies malicious apps into 3 main categories: duplicates, inappropriate content, and potentially dangerous apps. In 2017, many copies of famous apps really spread on the Play Store. These copies take advantage of the success of an app like WhatsApp, for example, to invade your devices. “We’ve removed over a quarter million fake apps”Explains Andrew Anh.

Thanks to advanced detection techniques, Google also “Dtens of thousands of apps with appropriate content such as pornography”. The same is true for potentially dangerous apps for your smartphone, such as malware: In 2017, the number of these apps decreased by 10 compared to 2016. If you want to download the latest version from Google Play Store and enjoy the latest Google features, we recommend you to download the APK. We explain how to do it in our tutorial.