Google took down over 7 lakh malicious apps from Play Store last year

Google pulled down over seven lakh malicious apps from Play Store in 2017; 70 percent more than the apps it removed in 2016, said the company. The apps were removed as they violated Google's policies. "Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and take action against them earlier," said Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, in a blog post.

To be precise, 99 per cent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them, he added further. In an attempt to identify repeat offenders and abusive developer networks at scale, Google has developed new detection models and techniques. Apart from that, the search engine giant also took down 100,000 bad developers last year.

"This was possible through significant improvements in our ability to detect abuse; such as impersonation, inappropriate content, or malware; through new Machine Learning models and techniques," stated the post.

For those who are unaware, there are some "Copycats" apps around that aim to deceive users by impersonating famous apps. They do this by trying to sneak in impersonating apps to the Play Store through deceptive methods like using confusable unicode characters or hiding impersonating app icons in a different locale.

"In 2017, we took down more than a quarter of a million of impersonating apps," notes the blog post.

As far as the inappropriate content including pornography, extreme violence, hate and illegal activities are concerned, Google's improved machine learning models sifted through massive amounts of incoming app submissions and flagged them for potential violations.

"Tens of thousands of apps with inappropriate content were taken down last year as a result of such improved detection methods," said Google.

Lastly, there is a type of malware called Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs), which can harm users and their devices; like apps that conduct SMS fraud, act as trojans or steals user's personal information.

"With the launch of Google Play Protect in 2017, the annual PHA installs rates on Google Play was reduced by 50 per cent year over year," said the post.

Google has been trying hard to keep harmful apps from its Play Store and it has been successful in its attempt to a great extent.