Google Removes Over 2 Million Policy-Violating Apps from Play Store in Past Year

New Delhi, April 30 (IANS) Google said that it prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being published on its Play Store in 2023. The company also banned 333,000 bad accounts from the Play Store for violations like confirmed malware and repeated severe policy breaches created by criminals and fraud rings.

Almost 200,000 app submissions were rejected or remediated by the tech giant to ensure proper use of sensitive permissions such as background location or SMS access.

"To help safeguard user privacy at scale, we partnered with SDK providers to limit sensitive data access and sharing, enhancing the privacy posture for over 31 SDKs impacting over 790,000 apps," Google wrote in its security-focused blogpost.

In addition, the company said that in order to better protect customers who install apps outside of the Play Store, it made Google Play Protect's security capabilities more powerful with real-time scanning at the code level to combat novel malicious apps.

"Our security protections and machine learning algorithms learn from each app submitted to Google for review and we look at thousands of signals and compare app behaviour," Google said.

According to the company, this new capability has already detected over 5 million new, malicious off-Play apps, which helps protect Android users globally. To give users more control over their personal data, the tech giant further mentioned that apps that enable account creation now need to provide an option to initiate account and data deletion from within the app and online.