In a curb to remove malicious, harmful content and keep its user’s safe google removes 700,000 Bad apps from its play store in 2017. That’s a 70 percent increase over the total removals in 2016.
“Not only did we remove more bad apps, but we were also able to identify and action against them earlier,” Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn wrote in a blog post. Google attributes this success to its improved ability to detect abuse through new machine learning models and techniques.
They also kicked the Copycat apps designed to resemble popular mainstays remain a popular method of trying to deceive users. Google removed over a quarter of a million of these impersonating apps last year.
How Does Google Removes 700,000 Bad apps.
Machine learning plays a key role here in helping human reviewers keep an eye out for bad apps and malicious developers. PHAs pose a threat to Android users and we invest heavily in keeping them out of the Play Store.
Potentially harmful applications” (PHAs) apps that attempt to phish users’ personal information, act as a trojan horse for malware, or commit SMS fraud by firing off texts without a user’s knowledge. Google also put all of its malware scanning and detection technologies under the umbrella of Google Play Protect.
The Android operating system automatically performs scans on installed applications to hunt for anything that’s out of place, and users can also manually trigger scans of their Android smartphones right in the updates section.