- Google says it blocked 2.36 million malicious Android apps from the Play Store in 2024
- Hundreds of thousands of developer accounts were also banned
- Google says AI help was behind it blocked for more apps than in previous years
Google says it was blocking 2.36 million Appeals made to the Play Store in 2024 because they were contrary to its policies and as such a potential cyber security risk.
In a Google Security blog post, the company outlined how, in addition to the blocked apps, it also prohibited 158,000 developer accounts trying to push malware and spyware to app repository.
Compared to these figures to 2023 and 2022, Google showed an increase in the number of blocked apps and app developer accounts. The year before it blocked 2.28 million and in 2022 – 1.5 million. As for developers, it blocked 333,000 and 173,000 respectively.
With a little help from my AI
The detailed how it was able to achieve these results, Google said it got help from artificial intelligence (AI). In 92% of positive results, human reviewers were actually helped by AI.
“Today, over 92% of our human reviews are for harmful apps AI assisted, allowing us to take faster and more accurate actions to prevent harmful apps from becoming available on Google Play,” the company said.
“It allows us to stop more bad apps than ever from reaching users through the Play store and protecting users from harmful or malicious apps before they can cause harm.”
Malicious apps can be facilitated to be identified with the permissions they request. Too demanding apps are usually a red flag, and last year Google blocked 1.3 million apps from getting excessive permissions.
Most malicious Android apps reside on third-party sites or are distributed via chat messages, e-mail, forums and such. While Google generally does a good job of keeping his app depot clean, a small number of dangerous apps make it past the protection from time to time.
Therefore, in addition to ensuring that apps are covered by Google’s Play Protect system, it is always advised to check the number of downloads and read the reviews before downloading apps.
