Technology Giant, Google owns and operates the Google Play. Also known as Play Store, it is the app store for Android-based devices. The company recently announced that last year it took action against "bad apps". Their aim was to eliminate bad apps and developer accounts from the platform completely. Google claims that it used machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify bad apps. It also used identifiers like impersonation, inappropriate content, and malware. The result was that over 700,000 apps and 100,000 developers were ruled out in 2017. This is a 70 percent jump in number from the previous year.
Android Developers Blog, operated by Google also claims. "In fact, 99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them."
Impersonation
Google, on its Android Developers Blog, states that impersonators were also removed. It's the most weighted red signal for removing apps from Google Play. Impersonating apps basically is the copy of some popular apps, meant to inject malware into your device. According to the company, in 2017 alone they removed as many as 250,000 apps. All of these apps were caught impersonating big and popular app titles. This practice is done by such impersonators through deceptive methods. These deceptive methods include confusable Unicode characters and hiding impersonating app icons in a different locale.
Inappropriate Content
Google Play does not allow any kind of inappropriate content. However, this is same with most of the Safe for Work online platforms. Inappropriate content according to a definition by the company includes pornography, extreme violence, illegal activities, and hate. The technology giant claims that their advanced machine learning models can identify such content easily. Quickly after the app submissions, their algorithms run and flag them for inappropriate content. After that, human reviewers jump into the scene. The process removed over tens of thousands of apps in the past year only.
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Malware
Potentially Harmful Applications or PHAs is also a red flag for Google. These applications will cause harm to the user's device. Thes PHA includes apps containing phishing, fraud, and Trojans. The technology giant claims that PHAs are currently small in number. However, they are investing a lot of time and research in finding them. With the launch of Google Play Protect, Google's malware scanning feature, the annual PHA install have gone down to around 50 percent.
Andrew Ahn, Product Manager at Google Play said. "Despite the new and enhanced detection capabilities that led to a record-high takedown of bad apps and malicious developers, we know a few still manage to evade and trick our layers of defense. We take these extremely seriously and will continue to innovate our capabilities to better detect and protect against abusive apps and the malicious actors behind them. We commit to making Google Play the most trusted and safe app store in the world."
