100,000 Apps Developers Were banned By Google

Last year, approximately 700,000 Android apps were removed by Google from the Google Play Store. The statistics made available by Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, Google Play revealed that this indicates an increase of 70% over 2016. According to Ahn, nearly 99% of the abusive apps were identified by the Google’s own filters. Subsequently, these apps were blocked earlier than users were permitted to download them. 

Ahn says that this was possible through their capability to identify abusive apps, and major developments such as impersonation, improper content, or malware. It was made possible through innovative machine learning techniques.

Furthermore, 100,000 developers were got banned last year, and Google discovered three different kinds of applications that were attempting to enter into the Google Play store despite violating Google’s strict policies.

"Malicious apps" are identified as the impersonators, which copycat well-known apps in an endeavor to trap users so that they should download them on their gadgets. The malicious apps carry out this by trying to enter in impersonating apps to the Play Store through unreliable methods. The common techniques utilized by them feature conceivable Unicode characters or hiding impersonating app icons in a different setting. The Google manager Ahn says that more than a quarter of millions of such apps were got blocked all together last year.

The Apps that create improper content is another major problem. Google makes clear that as they support content like pornography, intense violence, disgust, and illegitimate activities, tens of thousands of such apps that go down in this group were blocked by the Google Play Store detection methods.

However, in the last year, Google made all efforts to cut the number of Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs) by more than 50 percent. These apps have the ability to run malicious activities like carrying outing SMS fraud, phishing user’s details, or behaving as Trojans. The PHAs are risky to Android users and Google is trying its best in keeping them away from the Google Play Store.

Because of the major threats faced last year, Google assures to raise its focus on safety measures this year. The main aim of Google is to make Google Play as the most reliable and secure app store in the world.