Google on Monday revealed that nearly 200,000 app submissions to its Play Retailer for Android have been both rejected or remediated to deal with points with entry to delicate information corresponding to location or SMS messages over the previous yr.
The tech large additionally mentioned it blocked 333,000 unhealthy accounts from the app storefront in 2023 for trying to distribute malware or for repeated coverage violations.
“In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being printed on Google Play partially because of our funding in new and improved security measures, coverage updates, and superior machine studying and app assessment processes,” Google’s Steve Kafka, Khawaja Shams, and Mohet Saxena mentioned.
“To assist safeguard consumer privateness at scale, we partnered with SDK suppliers to restrict delicate information entry and sharing, enhancing the privateness posture for over 31 SDKs impacting 790K+ apps.”
As compared, Google fended off 1.43 million unhealthy apps from being printed to the Play Retailer in 2022, alongside banning 173,000 unhealthy accounts over the identical time interval.
As well as, the Mountain View-based agency mentioned it strengthened its developer onboarding and assessment processes, requiring them to furnish extra identification data and full a verification course of when organising their Play Console developer accounts.
This, the corporate famous, permits it to raised perceive the developer group and root out unhealthy actors from gaming the system to propagate malicious apps.
The event comes as Google is taking a collection of steps to safe the Android ecosystem. Final November, it moved the App Protection Alliance (ADA), which it launched in November 2019, underneath the Linux Basis umbrella, with Meta and Microsoft becoming a member of because the founding steering members.
Across the identical time, the corporate additionally rolled out real-time scanning on the code stage to sort out novel Android malware and an “Unbiased safety assessment” badge within the Play Retailer’s Information security part for VPN apps which have undergone a Cellular Software Safety Evaluation (MASA) audit.
On the user-facing aspect of issues, Google has additionally taken the step of taking down roughly 1.5 million purposes from the Play Retailer that don’t goal the newest APIs.
Google’s ongoing combat to sort out malicious actors on Android coincides with a lawsuit filed by the corporate within the U.S. in opposition to two China-based fraudsters who’re alleged to have engaged in a global on-line client funding fraud scheme and tricked customers into downloading faux apps from the Play Retailer and different sources and finally stealing their funds.
