According to the article we’re about to link to, how many apps were apparently blocked by Google Protect in the year of 2024?
Have you thought of your guess yet?
Google blocked 2.3 million Android app submissions to the Play Store in 2024 due to violations of its policies that made them potentially risky for users.
In addition, 158,000 developer accounts were banned for attempting to publish harmful apps like malware and spyware on Android’s official app store.
In comparison, Google blocked 2,280,000 risky apps in 2023 and 1,500,000 apps in 2022, while the figures for blocked Play developer accounts were 333,000 and 173,000, respectively.
According to the article, AI has assisted the number of apps and developers that have clearly violated the rules. If AI is used for this purpose and it is successful, I can support that. The fact that Android is so open makes it a prime target for unsuspecting victims who believe that the app they’re looking at is doing what is said.
“Today, over 92% of our human reviews for harmful apps are AI-assisted, allowing us to take quicker and more accurate action to help prevent harmful apps from becoming available on Google Play,” explained Google.
“That’s enabled us to stop more bad apps than ever from reaching users through the Play Store, protecting users from harmful or malicious apps before they can cause any damage.”
For you Android users, do you believe the following paragraph quoted herein?
Apart from rejections and blocks, Google reports that it has also prevented 1.3 million apps from getting excessive permissions that would have granted them unnecessary access to sensitive user data.
I guess we’ll have to see what the numbers will be this year being 2025.
Google Play Protect, Android’s built-in security system, received significant upgrades in 2024 to enhance real-time protection against malicious apps, scams, and fraud, even for apps installed outside the Play Store.
That’s nice. Glad to hear that the company actually cares these days,.
The article continues:
The tech giant says Android’s default protection suite scanned over 200 billion apps daily, performing live code-level analysis. During 2024, these scans identified over 13 million new malware apps sourced from outside Google Play.
The article says that developers have been given more tools to protect their development tools.
App developers were also given new tools to better secure their apps from malicious SDKs and abuse, with the Google Play SDK index expanding greatly last year to add another 80 trusted SDKs.
nstead of breaking the entire article down, I’ll go ahead and let you read this and decide what’s going on.
Google blocked 2.36 million risky Android apps from Play Store in 2024 is the articcle if you’d like to read it.
Have fun with this one.