Google removed 70 percent more apps from the Play Store last year than in 2016

Google removed about 70 percent more apps from the Play Store in 2017 than in the previous year. In total, 700,000 potentially dangerous apps were involved. The company says machine learning is responsible for the higher detection rate.

Google has long used static analysis to find potentially malicious code in apps, but the use of machine learning would have made “a breakthrough in detection,” Google Play security chief Dave Kleidermacher told TechCrunch . A large category of PUAs pretend to be popular ones and thus attempt to trick users into installing. Of those, the company removed about 250,000 from the Play Store in 2017.

There are several trends to be seen in apps. For example, Kleidermacher says that Google is now detecting more apps that try to install a cryptominer on the victim’s device. A few years ago, it was still popular with malicious apps to persuade victims to install other apps. That phenomenon would have almost completely disappeared today.

According to Kleidermacher, you are ten times more likely to install a malicious app outside the Play Store. Moreover, the system would not be perfect, because some forms of abuse are difficult to detect. For example, if data is sent to a back-end. Google regularly removes malware from the Play Store, such as malicious flashlight apps, ransomware, or apps that are part of a botnet.