Google announced that it prevented 2.36 million of the applications sent to the Play Store in 2024 because it violated its policies and pose a potential cyber security risk. In the Google Security Blog post published, it is also announced that 158,000 developers accounting to install malware and spyware in addition to blocked applications are also banned.
Compared to 2023 and 2022 these numbers, Google says that the number of blocked applications has an increase. The previous year was 2.28 million and 1.5 million applications were prevented in 2022. On the developers, there were 333,000 and 173,000 accounts respectively.
Google, explaining the method of achieving these results in detail, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was used, even 92 %of the positive results, human evaluators were helped by AI, he said. “Today, more than 92 %of our human investigations for harmful practices are artificial intelligence supported by the company. In this way, we can take faster and more accurate steps to prevent harmful applications from being used on Google Play ”. The explanation continues: “In this way, we were able to reduce the number of malicious applications reaching users through the Play Store more than ever and protected users from harmful or malicious applications before causing any damage.”
Permits, applications address
The easiest way to detect malicious practices is the permissions they demand. Usually, it is considered an important warning that an application demands too much permission and demanding permissions that should not be needed. Google says last year that 1.3 million applications prevented excessive leave.
Most malicious android applications are found on third-party websites or distributed by chat messages, e-mails, forums and similar ways. Although Google is often very effective in keeping the application store clean, sometimes few dangerous applications can exceed these protections.
Therefore, it is recommended to make sure that applications are protected by Google’s Play Protect system, as well as checking the number of downloads and reading comments before downloading any application. In addition, if there is an item that you doubt in the permissions that an application requested, you can investigate the safety of the application a little more in detail.
