“Our policies are making it tougher for predatory apps to be listed on the Play Store. Attackers still find ways to target their victims. Google also said it took down over 3,500 such apps in the year for violating its policy requirements.

TechCrunch extensively covered the impact of predatory loan apps on Indian users. Bad actors gain access to user data, including contacts and photos, which are used to bully users.

These apps have resulted in the harassment of users, leading in some cases to victims taking their own lives. One of the key reasons for Google to introduce its enhanced real-time code-level scanning feature is to counter the proliferation of predatory loan apps. Sideloading remains a popular feature for Android users, even if it means having to trust that the app they are installing is not malicious. Many device owners also take to sideloading Android apps, which skirt the app store altogether and its many lines of defense. This consists of a code analysis that will “extract important signals from the app and send them to the Play Protect backend infrastructure for a code-level evaluation.”Īndroid’s app store has billions of apps that Google screens for malware, though not always successfully. Google said this Play Protect feature now recommends a real-time app scan for any new app that has never been scanned before. These apps will morph their appearance or use AI to alter the apps’ code in a way that helps them avoid detection. Google announced in October the new real-time app scanning feature built into Google Play Protect that the company says can help catch malicious or fake sideloaded apps installed from outside the app store. Android’s in-built security engine Google Play Protect has a new feature that conducts a real-time analysis of an Android app’s code and blocks it from installing the app if it’s considered potentially harmful.

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