14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s Communications and Public Affairs Manager Elijah Lawal recently presented the many ways in which the tech giant protects Android users from Potentially Harmful Applications, an element of Android’s security features.
The list of Potentially Harmful Applications (PHA) includes backdoors, which are apps that let hackers control the smartphone by granting them access to personal data. In addition, such apps could be involved in billing fraud and intentionally charge users in a misleading way with premium SMS scams or even call scams.
Spyware apps are another category of Potentially Harmful Apps, which collect personal data from Android phones, without the user’s consent. Other apps can download harmful programs and some even have Trojan viruses, thus performing undesirable actions on the phone.
Verify Apps scans around 400 million devices per day
In order to keep Android users safe, Google uses the Verify Apps cloud-based service which checks every app prior to its installation. Google’s Verify Apps checks more than 6 billion installed apps and scans around 400 million devices per day. When it detects a PHA, the service warns users to immediately remove the app from their phones.
In some cases, the service can automatically remove the app without receiving confirmation from the user. Google mentioned that over 99% of all Android devices were free of PHAs in 2015. Only 0.15% of the users who only installed apps and games from Google Play ran into a PHA in the same year.
A recent report said that 80% of all devices running Android 7.0 are encrypted, which means that Google has made real efforts to protect Android users from PHAs. Moreover, Google is taking a proactive approach on the Play store, as the company intends to limit visibility or even completely remove apps if they violate the company’s User Data policy.
The post highlights Google’s commitment towards improving protection services for Android devices and protecting users from current and future security threats. There are more than 1.6 billion Android devices in the wild at the moment and Google does its best to keep most of them protected.