Google Removes More Than 700,000 Bad Apps From Play Store In 2017

It has been reported that Google took down over 700,000 bad Androidid apps from Play Store in 2017, which is a 70 percent increase in total removal in 2016.

Google has for years been working hard towards preventing malicious apps from reaching Android users by creating numerous safeguards. And it seems the efforts are beginning to pay off.

In a blog post, Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn has this to say:

“Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and act against them earlier,”

He added that “99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them.”

Google success in detecting and restricting bad apps has been due to their “new machine learning models and techniques.” These has played a key role in detecting abuse from likes of Copycat apps, created to impersonate popular apps in order to deceive users. Google removed thousands of these copycat apps last year.

Google said they kept “tens of thousands” of apps with inappropriate content (pornography, extreme violence, hate, and illegal activities) out of the Play Store.

“We invest heavily in keeping (Potentially harmful applications) out of the Play Store,” Ahn said.

Despite all these efforts, bad apps still occasionally slip through Google’s defenses. Just earlier this month, Google had to remove 60 games from the Play Store— some of them meant for children — that were found to display pornographic ads.

Google promised to continue the fight against harmful apps by improving its methods and machine learning models. Let's hope they succeed.