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Google Play Store App Rejections Up 55% From Last Year, App Suspensions Up 66% (zdnet.com)
In a year-in-review announcement today, Google said Play Store app rejections went up 55% last year after the OS maker tightened up its app review process. From a report: Similarly, stats for app suspensions also went up, by more than 66%, according to Google, which the company credited to its continued investment in "automated protections and human review processes that play critical roles in identifying and enforcing on bad apps." One of the most significant roles in the automated systems cited by Google in identifying malware is the Google Play Protect service, which is currently included by default with the official Play Store app. Google said this service now scans over 50 billion apps per day, and even goes as far as downloading and scanning every Android app it finds on the internet.
[...] Play Store's automated systems are now getting better and better at detecting threats, so much so that Google is now seeing clear patterns. "We find that over 80% of severe policy violations are conducted by repeat offenders and abusive developer networks," Ahn said. "When malicious developers are banned, they often create new accounts or buy developer accounts on the black market in order to come back to Google Play."
[...] Play Store's automated systems are now getting better and better at detecting threats, so much so that Google is now seeing clear patterns. "We find that over 80% of severe policy violations are conducted by repeat offenders and abusive developer networks," Ahn said. "When malicious developers are banned, they often create new accounts or buy developer accounts on the black market in order to come back to Google Play."
Russian spyware in advance of the 2020 elections, anyone? It has gotten unreal.
In comparison to the actually useful and thorough checks that are mandatory for an app to be published in the free open source repository https://f-droid.org/ Google is a shady shack of scam apps with few exceptions among the malware.
And yet there's still 33,872,981,370 spyware, call stealing, and otherwise just pure shit apps available.
I mean, how is this news. So what if Google put a dent in the massive stream of new shitware. At only 40% of its former self, it's still a massive stream of new shitware!
I pretty much stopped using the app store because, well one, Android has no real security mechanisms in the first place which makes apps inherently insecure from a privacy aspect, and two... Most apps are just crap.
I have a nephew who writes crapware in his parent's basement. He is a classical example of what is happening in the world of so called "computer apps" He brags about his "coding" skills but in reality is just a cut and paste specialist with some networking knowledge. AND yes he hangs out with the blackhat goofass crowd that trades in malwarz.
Google is spot on with their assessment of the situation. Most of the spyware crap never makes any real cash and is being done by pimple-faced kids or failed programmers in who want to make a quick buck. The stuff that actually succeeds making money is much harder to deal with. This is the problem with so called CS being taught in schools today, it teaches reliance upon coding ecosystems instead of creativity and core skills so a large portion of the less skilled kids get creative in defiant ways and get involved with what could be called "coding gangs". All they do is brag to each other and show off their so called apps which they trade their code for the way they have always done. When you see some of the actual code they create and the comments you know that they could never earn a living in the real world.
app rejections went up 55%
So from 20 to 31?
app suspensions also went up, by more than 66%
So from 3 to 5?
We find that over 80% of severe policy violations are conducted by repeat offenders and abusive developer networks
So they found 5 severe policy violations, then 4 of them did it again the next year?
Of course it's probably more. But without actual numbers, statistics like these are useless.
It's still a cesspool of ad infected garbage.
I can't even find a simple weather widget that doesn't start making my phone spew full screen ads at me randomly.
Take your Play Store and shove it.
Few weeks ago my app (RSS reader) got unpublished. They said I was violating YouTube terms of service. YouTube have RSS feeds but they are not accessible on mobile. So I added feature where user can simply write "YouTube Cody's lab" and it will add RSS feed from that channel. I had to remove this feature in order to get published again.
Meh, this is just a way to get more money from developers. The typical submission will start to fail on first round no matter what the application does and one just needs to pay one more round to get the acceptance. Seriously, nobody really believes the acceptance test do reveal anything which is hidden on purpose. Only the most blatant Angry birds and Fortnite clones will get caught by the testing.
They are using a lot more humans now.
I thought it was great at first as a Android user.
As a developer, suddenly my apps are getting suspended as someone randomly reviewed my game after a year being in the store. ...
He/she saw an ad that he/she deemed inappropriate (+18). The ad network I'm using is AdMob (Google mobile ads) and is not +18
I'm getting a constant list of suspensions of bogus copyright / vague policies / third party issues.
I'm really disgruntled with how they handled it. I'm assuming they are not training their staff or just outsourcing it.
They removed Gab before, and that's about it. So what, did they remove one more app?