Google prevented 2.36 million “policy-violating” apps from being published on its Google Play store in 2024, as it ramped up its efforts to keep out malicious Android apps from infecting the smartphones of unsuspecting users.
The Internet giant, which makes the most popular operating system on smartphones, also banned more than 158,000 “bad” developer accounts that sought to publish harmful apps.
This, it revealed a couple of days ago, was down to improved threat detection with AI’s help, as well as stronger privacy policies, developer tools and industry alliances.
One such alliance was with Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency, which worked with Google for a trial on enhanced fraud protection last year. This prevents users from installing apps that seek sensitive permissions often used for financial fraud.
Now, this fraud protection effort has been extended to nine other regions – Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam.
In 2024, these Google Play Protect pilot trials shielded 10 million devices from over 36 million risky installation attempts, encompassing over 200,000 unique apps.
These efforts will help protect a large number of users without their manual intervention, as scams become more prevalent and harder to detect, particularly with AI-enabled ones appearing of late.
Google also uses AI to help combat the bad guys. Over 92 per cent of its human reviews for harmful apps are AI-assisted, it says, making things quicker and more accurate in preventing harmful apps from getting into the Google Play store.
Notably, Google scans more than 200 billion apps daily and performs real-time scanning at the code-level on novel apps to combat emerging and hidden threats, such as polymorphic malware.
In 2024, this real-time scanning by the company identified more than 13 million new malicious apps from outside Google Play.
It’s another good reason not to “jailbreak” your phone and try to sideload an app you have downloaded from a source that’s not trustworthy. Doing so could open up your phone – and data – to scams and fraud.
Unless you know what you’re doing, say, to test out how new programs work, then it’s a much safer bet to keep to apps published on the Google Play store.
