Every year Google takes stock of how Android security in general and the fight against malicious applications in particular has evolved. This year Google boasts of having standing feet to no less than 2.28 million applications that did not comply with Google’s privacy policies.
Is almost double than last year, when there were 1.4 million (and in 2021 there were 1.2 million). This increase comes despite the fact that during the year Google has implemented different initiatives and ended up banning more than 300,000 accounts of malicious developers.
The state of Google Play security
Throughout 2024, Google prevented 2.28 million malicious apps from reaching Google Play, in part thanks to a combination of security improvements, policy changes, advances in machine learning and improvements to application review.
Likewise, Google banned 333,000 accounts of malicious developers during the year for serious security breaches such as confirmed cases of malware or repeat policy violations.
More than 200,000 using sensitive permissions such as access to SMS or background location were also rejected or modified to use permissions according to the latest security requirements imposed by Google.
During 2023 Google will also worked with SDK vendors to limit access to sensitive data by SDKs, thereby improving privacy in some 31 SDKs used in more than 790,000 applications, in addition to expanding their SDK index to include those used in almost 6 million applications.
According to Google, these improvements come thanks to initiatives such as developers needing to provide more information when registering on Google Play, new alliances with Microsoft and Meta within the framework of the App Defense Alliance, the Play Protect code-level real-time scanning to combat new malicious applications and updates to Google Play policies. Some of these changes are, for example, introducing a separate security seal for secure VPNs or allowing applications that can create accounts to delete them.
For the future, Google warns that it will intensify the fight against malware with new security initiatives, in addition to try to set precedent after reporting two developers who repeatedly distributed malware on Google Play.
More information | Google