Google has removed 700,000 apps from the Play store which were found to be violating the store’s policies. According to Google Play Product Manager Andrew Ahn, 99 percent of apps with abusive content were identified and rejected before anyone could install them.
Most of the apps which were violating play store terms were found to be in relation to pornography, extreme violence, hate and illegal activities. This clearly shows terms violating apps come in all shapes and sizes. Taking this into consideration, Google reduced the rate of potentially harmful application (PHA) installations by a factor of 10 compared to 2016.
Andrew Ahn frther revealed that, new detection models and approaches are being used to identify repeat offenders and abusive developer networks. With these new machine learning models and techniques, Google was able to remove 100,000 bad actors and make it harder for them to create new accounts in an attempt to regain access.