Google announced on Monday that nearly 200,000 apps submitted to its Android Play Store were rejected or corrected to address issues with sensitive data access such as location or SMS messages in the past year. The tech giant also reported blocking 333,000 bad accounts from the app store in 2023 for attempting to distribute malware or repeated policy violations.
«In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play, in part due to our investment in new and improved security features, policy updates, and advanced app review processes and machine learning,» said Google‘s Steve Kafka, Khawaja Shams, and Mohet Saxena.
«To help safeguard user privacy at scale, we teamed up with SDK providers to limit the access and sharing of sensitive data, enhancing privacy posture for over 31 SDKs impacting more than 790,000 apps.»
In comparison, Google rejected 1.43 million potentially malicious apps for the Play Store in 2022 and also blocked 173,000 bad accounts during the same time period. Additionally, the company strengthened its developer onboarding and review processes, requiring them to provide more identity information and complete a verification process when setting up their Play Console developer accounts.
This, according to the company, enables better understanding of the developer community and uncovering malicious actors attempting to propagate harmful apps. This aligns with the lawsuit filed by the company in the US against two China-based scammers allegedly involved in an international online investment fraud scheme, deceiving users into downloading fake apps from the Play Store and other sources, ultimately stealing their funds.
Vía The Hacker News
