Posted by Steve Kafka and Khawaja Shams (Android Security and Privacy Team), and Mohet Saxena (Play Trust and Safety)

A safe and trusted Google Play experience is our top priority. We leverage our SAFE (see below) principles to provide the framework to create that experience for both users and developers. Here's what these principles mean in practice:

• (S)afeguard our Users. Help them discover quality apps that they can trust.
• (A)dvocate for Developer Protection. Build platform safeguards to enable developers to focus on growth.
• (F)oster Responsible Innovation. Thoughtfully unlock value for all without compromising on user safety.
• (E)volve Platform Defenses. Stay ahead of emerging threats by evolving our policies, tools and technology.

With those principles in mind, we’ve made recent improvements and introduced new measures to continue to keep Google Play’s users safe, even as the threat landscape continues to evolve. In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play¹ in part thanks to our investment in new and improved security features, policy updates, and advanced machine learning and app review processes. We have also strengthened our developer onboarding and review processes, requiring more identity information when developers first establish their Play accounts. Together with investments in our review tooling and processes, we identified bad actors and fraud rings more effectively and banned 333K bad accounts from Play for violations like confirmed malware and repeated severe policy violations.

Additionally, almost 200K app submissions were rejected or remediated to ensure proper use of sensitive permissions such as background location or SMS access. To help safeguard user privacy at scale, we partnered with SDK providers to limit sensitive data access and sharing, enhancing the privacy posture for over 31 SDKs impacting 790K+ apps. We also significantly expanded the Google Play SDK Index, which now covers the SDKs used in almost 6 million apps across the Android ecosystem. This valuable resource helps developers make better SDK choices, boosts app quality and minimizes integration risks.

Protecting the Android Ecosystem

Building on our success with the App Defense Alliance (ADA), we partnered with Microsoft and Meta as steering committee members in the newly restructured ADA under the Joint Development Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation family. The Alliance will support industry-wide adoption of app security best practices and guidelines, as well as countermeasures against emerging security risks.

Additionally, we announced new Play Store transparency labeling to highlight VPN apps that have completed an independent security review through App Defense Alliance’s Mobile App Security Assessment (MASA). When a user searches for VPN apps, they will now see a banner at the top of Google Play that educates them about the “Independent security review” badge in the Data safety section. This helps users see at-a-glance that a developer has prioritized security and privacy best practices and is committed to user safety.

To better protect our customers who install apps outside of the Play Store, we made Google Play Protect’s security capabilities even more powerful with real-time scanning at the code-level to combat novel malicious apps. Our security protections and machine learning algorithms learn from each app submitted to Google for review and we look at thousands of signals and compare app behavior. This new capability has already detected over 5 million new, malicious off-Play apps, which helps protect Android users worldwide.

More Stringent Developer Requirements and Guidelines

Last year we updated Play policies around Generative AI apps, disruptive notifications, and expanded privacy protections. We also are raising the bar for new personal developer accounts by requiring new testing requirements before developers can make their app available on Google Play. By testing their apps, getting feedback and ensuring everything is ready before they launch, developers are able to bring more high quality content to Play users. In order to increase trust and transparency, we’ve introduced expanded developer verification requirements, including D-U-N-S numbers for organizations and a new “About the developer” section.

To give users more control over their personal data, apps that enable account creation now need to provide an option to initiate account and data deletion from within the app and online. This web requirement is especially important so that a user can request account and data deletion without having to reinstall an app. To simplify the user experience, we have also incorporated this as a feature within the Data safety section of the Play Store.

With each iteration of the Android operating system (including its robust set of APIs), a myriad of enhancements are introduced, aiming to elevate the user experience, bolster security protocols, and optimize the overall performance of the Android platform. To further safeguard our customers, approximately 1.5 million applications that do not target the most recent APIs are no longer available in the Play Store to new users who have updated their devices to the latest Android version.

Looking Ahead

Protecting users and developers on Google Play is paramount and ever-evolving. We're launching new security initiatives in 2024, including removing apps from Play that are not transparent about their privacy practices.

We also recently filed a lawsuit in federal court against two fraudsters who made multiple misrepresentations to upload fraudulent investment and crypto exchange apps on Play to scam users. This lawsuit is a critical step in holding these bad actors accountable and sending a clear message that we will aggressively pursue those who seek to take advantage of our users.

We're constantly working on new ways to protect your experience on Google Play and across the entire Android ecosystem, and we look forward to sharing more.

Notes

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1. In accordance with the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) reporting requirements, Google Play now calculates policy violations based on developer communications sent. ↩

Posted by Rahul Mishra, Program Manager, Android Security and Privacy Team

Through 2019, Google Play Protect continued to improve the security for 2.5 billion Android devices. Built into Android, Play Protect scans over 100 billion apps every day for malware and other harmful apps. This past year, Play Protect prevented over 1.9 billion malware installs from unknown sources. Throughout 2019 there were many improvements made to Play Protect to bring the best of Google to Android devices to keep users safe. Some of the new features launched in 2019 include:
Advanced similarity detection
Play Protect now warns you about variations of known malware right on the device. On-device protections warn users about Potentially Harmful Apps (PHAs) at install time for a faster response. Since October 2019, Play Protect issued 380,000 warnings for install attempts using this system.
Warnings for apps targeting lower Android versions
Malware developers intentionally target devices running long outdated versions of Android to abuse exploits that have recently been patched. In 2018, Google Play started requiring new apps and app updates be built for new versions of the Android OS. This strategy ensures that users downloading apps from Google Play recieve apps that take advantage of the latest privacy and security improvements in the OS.
In 2019, we improved on this strategy with warnings to the user. Play Protect now notifies users when they install an app that is designed for outdated versions. The user can then make an informed decision to proceed with the installation or stop the app from being installed so they can look for an alternative that target the most current version of Android.

Uploading rare apps for scanning
The Android app ecosystem is growing at an exponential rate. Millions of new app versions are created and shared outside of Google Play daily posing a unique scaling challenge. Knowledge of new and rare apps is essential to provide the best protection possible.
We added a new feature that lets users help the fight against malware by sending apps Play Protect hasn't seen before for scanning during installation. The upload to Google’s scanning services preserves the privacy of the user and enables Play Protect to improve the protection for all users.

Integration with Google’s Files app
Google’s Files app is used by hundreds of millions of people every month to manage the storage on their device, share files safely, and clean up clutter and duplicate files. This year, we integrated Google Play Protect notifications within the app so that users are prompted to scan and remove any harmful applications that may be installed.

Play Protect visual updates
The Google Play Store has over 2 billion monthly active users coming to safely find the right app, game, and other digital content. This year the team was excited to roll out a complete visual redesign. With this change, Play Protect made several user-facing updates to deliver a cleaner, more prominent experience including a reminder to enable app-scanning in My apps & games to improve security.

The mobile threat landscape is always changing and so Google Play Protect must keep adapting and improving to protect our users. Visit developers.google.com/android/play-protect to stay informed on all the new exciting features and improvements being added to Google Play Protect.
Acknowledgements: Aaron Josephs, Ben Gruver, James Kelly, Rodrigo Farell, Wei Jin and William Luh