Google took down over 700,000 malicious Android apps in 2017

There are over 3,500,000 “approved” applications in the Google Play Store but not all of these are useful or fun, a bunch of them are designed to wreak havoc on users lives and that’s where Google has been hard at work to take these bad apps out. The company recently announced it has taken down over 700,000 apps from the Play Store, which is a 70 percent increase from the total removals they’ve done in 2016. “Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier,” Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn wrote in a blog post. “99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them.”

Google claims they’re able to do this with the company’s “new machine learning models and techniques.” It made it easier for them to detect the bad apps as well as any of the copycat apps that try to deceive users. Google says they’ve taken down a quarter of a million of these impersonating apps in 2017. They’ve also kept “tens of thousands” of apps with inappropriate content (those that have pornography, hate, illegal activities, and extreme violence) out of the app store. Machine learning has helped the human reviewers make sure these apps and developers were kept away from the Play Store. They’re also working on keeping Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs) out of the Store, even though these are as Ahn says “small in volume.” Of course, they aren’t 100% successful and have had a few bad apps slip into its system but Google promises they’re working to improve their methods and machine learning models so that they keep these apps out.

Source: The Verge + Inquirer.net