Google removed 700,000 malicious apps from the Play Store in 2017

Google has announced that the company has removed more than 700,000 malicious apps from the Google Play Store. A malicious app is an app that violates Google Play’s policies in one way or another.

Out of the 700,000 malicious apps identified by Google, 99 percent were rejected before users could install them. However, these numbers equate to 7,000 malicious apps making their way to Android devices.

Nevertheless, this 99 percent is an impressive feat for Google when compared to 2016 when the company was only able to remove 70 percent of abusive apps.

Google says it was able to this through new machine learning models and techniques. This improved the company’s ability to detect abusive apps that features inappropriate content and malware.

To explain further, copycat apps often pretend to be one of the more famous titles on the Play Store in an attempt to attain a massive number of installs. Inappropriate content relates to apps that hide content such as pornography, extreme violence, hate and illegal activities, according to Google.

The company has also added a new detection model that identifies repeat offenders and abusive developers, resulting in Google removing 100,000 “bad developers” from its App Store in 2017.

Google announced last year in July that the company is using artificial intelligence to help identify malicious apps entering the Play Store. One of the techniques the company used to do so is called peer grouping, which compares data regarding apps that perform similar tasks.

Already in 2018, Google has removed 60 games from the Play Store.

For a more detailed look at the Developer Blog post click here.

Source: Android Developer Blog