Google’s crackdown on bad developers: 2M apps banned from Play Store

Google barred 2.36 million Android apps from entering the Google Play store and prevented an additional 1.3 million apps from gaining excessive access to sensitive user data in 2024. Google also banned more than 158,000 bad developer accounts.

And that was just the start, the tech giant says.

Google Play Protect is a built-in service that automatically scans every apps on Android devices in real time. Last year, it examined more than 200 billion apps every day and helped catch more than 13 million new malicious apps from outside Google Play.

Most malware families come from Internet-sideloading sources, such as web browsers, messaging apps, or file managers. To fight this, Google introduced three major improvements:

• Users won’t be able to disable Play Protect during phone or video calls, as scammers often try to manipulate them to disable this safeguard.
• Android users now should expect that Chrome on Android will remind them to re-enable the Google Play Protect feature if it has been turned off.
• Android automatically revokes app permissions for potentially dangerous apps to protect data privacy. The apps that haven’t been used in a while will lose access to sensitive data like storage, photos, and cameras. The user can always grant permissions back if necessary.

“We also required apps to be more transparent about how they handle user information by launching new developer requirements and a new ‘data deletion’ option for apps that support user accounts and data collection,” the company said in a report.

Financial fraud is one of the ecosystem's biggest challenges. Last year, Google launched enhanced fraud protection pilots that have shielded 10 million devices from over 36 million risky installation attempts, encompassing over 200,000 unique apps.

Most apps on the Google Play Store now come with the latest protections of Android 13 or newer. Developers using the Play Integrity API can check if third parties have tampered with their apps by offering APKs on other download sources. This feature led to an 80% lower ‘usage from unverified and untrusted sources.’

Google says that to stop bad apps from entering Google Play, over 92% of human reviews for harmful apps are AI-assisted.

The number of blocked apps is higher than the total number of available apps on the Google Store. The marketplace has around 1.6 million apps, according to AppBrain statistics.