Google says it is making it more difficult for fraudulent developers to have their applications published on its Play store while also eliminating big amounts of illegitimate accounts.
The tech giant said it removed 173,000 bad accounts in 2022 and raised the bar for new developers by adding phone, email and other identity verification methods.
This aided the company in reducing the number of accounts used to publish apps in violation of its standards. Google stated that it had prevented 1.43 million of these apps from being released on the Play store.
Google estimated that it prevented $2bn in “fraudulent and abusive” transactions.
Google claims that during the last three years, it has prevented over 500,000 submitted apps from gaining crucial rights needlessly due to enhanced Android platform security and standards, as well as developer outreach and education.
In fact, developer outreach appears to be an increasingly important part of Google’s efforts to make the Android ecosystem safe for users.
To that end, last year Google launched an App Security Improvements program which it claimed helped developers fix 500,000 security weaknesses impacting 300,000 apps with around 250 billion installs.
A Helpline pilot was also launched in 2022 to give developers assistance with policy queries, while a new Google Play Developer Community, also in pilot, is intended to provide a platform for developers to discuss policy challenges and share best practices.
However, despite Google’s best efforts, malicious apps continue to make their way with alarming frequency onto the Play store. Most recently, McAfee discovered dozens of Minecraft games containing HiddenAds Trojan malware.
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