In 2017, Google removed more than 700,000 apps that violated Google Play policies, that is 70% more than the year before. In a post on the Android Developers blog, the company shared details of Google Play’s efforts to protect Android users from misleading, inappropriate, or harmful apps. To put that number in context, Statista pegs the total number apps on the Play Store at the end of 2017 at 3.5 million. That is 900,000 more than what it was at the end of 2016. Google attributes these removals to its improved ability to detect abuse “through new machine learning models and techniques.” “Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier,” Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn wrote in the blog post. “99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them.” Another problem that Google says it tackled in 2017 was repeat offenders and “abusive developer networks at scale.” There were 100,000 such bad developers that were removed, with the company taking other steps to prevent the creation of new accounts. Apps on the chopping block The blog mentions the three types of apps that Google went after in 2017: Copycats: Apps that deceive users by impersonating legitimate apps, since those titles get a lot of search traffic for particular keywords. Impersonating apps are snuck into the Play Store through deceptive methods such as using confusable Unicode characters or hiding impersonating app icons in…
