Google on Monday revealed that nearly 200,000 app submissions to its Play Retailer for Android had been both rejected or remediated to handle points with entry to delicate knowledge equivalent to location or SMS messages over the previous yr.
The tech large additionally stated it blocked 333,000 unhealthy accounts from the app storefront in 2023 for making an attempt to distribute malware or for repeated coverage violations.
“In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play in part thanks to our investment in new and improved security features, policy updates, and advanced machine learning and app review processes,” Google’s Steve Kafka, Khawaja Shams, and Mohet Saxena stated.
“To help safeguard user privacy at scale, we partnered with SDK providers to limit sensitive data access and sharing, enhancing the privacy posture for over 31 SDKs impacting 790K+ apps.”
Compared, Google fended off 1.43 million unhealthy apps from being revealed 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 stated it strengthened its developer onboarding and assessment processes, requiring them to furnish extra id info and full a verification course of when establishing their Play Console developer accounts.
This, the corporate famous, allows it to raised perceive the developer neighborhood and root out unhealthy actors from gaming the system to propagate malicious apps.
The event comes as Google is taking a sequence of steps to safe the Android ecosystem. Final November, it moved the App Protection Alliance (ADA), which it launched in November 2019, below the Linux Basis umbrella, with Meta and Microsoft becoming a member of because the founding steering members.
Across the similar time, the corporate additionally rolled out real-time scanning on the code stage to deal with novel Android malware and an “Independent security review” badge within the Play Retailer’s Knowledge security part for VPN apps which have undergone a Cell 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 functions from the Play Retailer that don’t goal the newest APIs.
Google’s ongoing battle to deal with malicious actors on Android coincides with a lawsuit filed by the corporate within the U.S. towards 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 in the end stealing their funds.
