Google released a report on the state of Play Store security, covering threats to users, its own app, and more.
The headline statistic is that Google preemptively blocked 1,2 million apps from publishing for violating its platform rules in 2021. On top of that, Google also banned 190,000 developer accounts for malicious behavior and closed 500,000 inactive developer accounts.
“In the past year, we introduced several privacy-focused features, enhanced our protections against bad apps and developers, and improved SDK data security,” the company wrote.
"In addition, Google Play Protect continues to scan billions of apps installed on billions of devices every day to protect users from malware and unwanted software."
Malware has long been a problem on the Play Store. The most recent example, reported by the Wall Street Journal, was linked to a US defense contractor and affected Muslim prayer apps with more than 10 million downloads, among others.
Compared to Apple, Google has sometimes had a more lax approach to verifying app submissions, leaving users to rely more on Android's antivirus services. Over time, the company has become more aggressive in weeding out bad actors.
game store progress
In its blog post, Google details the progress it has made in preventing developers from publishing apps that harm users.
"Thanks to new platform protections and policies, collaboration, and developer training, 98% of apps that migrated to Android 11 or later reduced their access to sensitive APIs and user data," the company says. .
Pixel users also got some special treatment from Google, including a new Security Center that offers a centralized way to manage security on Android.
Google is also introducing new machine learning models to help improve detection of malware and ransomware on Pixel devices.