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Google Play Removed 700,000 Bad Apps In 2017, 70 Percent More Than In 2016 (venturebeat.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cease-and-desist dept.

Today, Google announced that it removed more than 700,000 apps that violated Google Play's policies, or 70 percent more apps than the year before. "Google does not share total Google Play app numbers anymore, so we have to rely on third-party estimates to put this 70 percent figure into perspective," reports VentureBeat. "Statista pegs the total number of apps on Google Play at 2.6 million in December 2016 and 3.5 million in December 2017, a 35 percent growth. How many of those were bad apps, however, is anyone's guess." From the report: All we know is that the number of bad apps removed grew faster than the total number of apps in the store, which makes sense if you take into account the next statistic Google revealed today: 99 percent of apps with abusive content were identified and rejected before anyone could install them in 2017. This was possible, Google says, thanks to its implementation of machine learning models and techniques to detect abusive app content and behaviors such as impersonation, inappropriate content, or malware. The company claims that the odds of getting malware is 10x lower via Google Play than if you install apps from outside sources.

1 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Permission System by jma05 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I am most annoyed by Google's choices in the Permission System. It is defective by design. What did they expect? It is now the choice malware target. Sure, it is an improvement since the earlier versions since we can revoke permissions now. The system is far less leaky on iOS (at least it was, I have not owned an iOS device in a while). I really wish I could set up virtual/shadow address books and file systems. The current system is just playing whack-a-mole. There should be a setting where apps will not have access to any of my private information by default, but still not fail when denied. Or a means to have two profiles, a trusted and a sandbox profile.. and it should be trivial for the user to switch between them, while providing good feedback on which one is active.