Google says it has blocked 1.2 million apps from being published on the Google Play store, allowing it to “prevent billions of harmful installs” on Android devices. While Google’s Play Store reviews have often been considered less stringent than Apple’s App Store reviews, Google has recently made greater efforts to protect the privacy and security of users on all three billion devices. Android active today.
Google says it also banned 190,000 bad accounts in 2021 as part of its efforts to hamper malicious developers and spammers. The American giant has also closed 500,000 inactive or abandoned developer accounts. “Last year, we introduced multiple privacy-focused features, strengthened our protections against bad apps and bad developers, and improved SDK data security.
Additionally, Google Play Protect continues to scan billions of apps installed on billions of devices every day to protect people from malware and unwanted software,” Google’s Android and Privacy teams say in a blog post. In 2021, Google worked to strike a balance between security for end users and convenience for developers whose work powers the Play Store, which had around 3.5 million apps available for download.
A major market for Google… And Apple
The issue is crucial for Google, while the market for mobile applications continues to grow. According to analytics firm App Annie, consumers will spend $170 billion on mobile apps in 2021, with around 65% of revenue going to Apple’s App Store compared to 35% to Google Play. Consumers downloaded 230 billion new apps in 2021, or about 435,000 apps per minute. Still, 98.3 billion of those downloads were made by users in China, where Google Play is not available, while US consumers accounted for 12 billion of the total.
Google introduced a data security program last May that requires developers to give users details about the types of data collected by an app, the use of encryption and how the data is used. Google requires developers to fix any detected policy violations. They risk being penalized if they do not comply with the corrections requested by Google. Developers have until July 20 to declare to Play store users the information required under the data security initiative.
“Thanks to new platform protections and policies, developer collaboration and education, 98% of apps migrating to Android 11 or higher have reduced access to sensitive APIs and user data,” Google claims. . “We’ve also significantly reduced unnecessary, dangerous, or unauthorized use of accessibility APIs in apps migrating to Android 12, while preserving functionality for legitimate use cases.”
Source: ZDNet.com