Google Play Store begins app crackdown

Rebecca Appleton • 21 February 2020

App store starts process of app removal

A person is holding a cell phone in their hand in front of a laptop.

If you read our app news roundup earlier this month, you’ll know that research carried out a security intelligence blog had unearthed a series of malicious apps which had been hundreds of thousands of times on the Google Play store. Trend Micro said the apps had been available on Google Play since 2017, and had been downloaded almost half a million times, leaving users vulnerable to malicious software installs.

This week, it appears that Google has begun to take action – it has revealed that Android developers who create apps which break the app store’s code of practise would find their apps removed from Google Play and future creations banned from appearing on the store.

Google outlined its tough new measures yesterday (Thursday) and took aim at those apps which deploy out-of-app ads. An out-of-app add is just that – it’s an ad that originates with the app but displays outside of the app’s interface, such as on the user’s device home screen or over the top of other apps.

To begin its crackdown, Google identified 600 apps which were guilty of this practise and removed them from Google Play. The developers who created the apps to include out-of-app ads have also been banned from the store and will no longer be able to upload apps to Play.

In its explanation, Google says that it has been able to deploy cutting edge machine learning technology to help in its fight against rule breakers. Google’s senior product manager for ad traffic quality, Per Bjorke said in an official statement,

“As part of our ongoing efforts — along with help from newly developed technologies — today we’re announcing nearly 600 apps have been removed from the Google Play Store and banned from our ad monetization platforms, Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager, for violating our disruptive ads policy and disallowed interstitial policy.

“Mobile ad fraud is an industry-wide challenge that can appear in many different forms with a variety of methods, and it has the potential to harm users, advertisers and publishers. At Google, we have dedicated teams focused on detecting and stopping malicious developers that attempt to defraud the mobile ecosystem. As part of these efforts we take action against those who create seemingly innocuous apps, but which actually violate our ads policies.

“As we move forward, we will continue to invest in new technologies to detect and prevent emerging threats that can generate invalid traffic, including disruptive ads, and to find more ways to adapt and evolve our platform and ecosystem policies to ensure that users and advertisers are protected from bad behaviour.”

According to BuzzFeed, the crackdown has resulted in one of the world’s largest Android app makers, the Chinese CheetahMobile, being banned from Google Play.

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