Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- In 2024, human reviewers on the Google Play security team were able to stop more harmful apps from making it to the Play Store than ever before.
- In 92% of these cases, the human reviewers used AI-based tools.
- The company also released a few new security features in 2024 that have seen much success.
If 2024 is going to be remembered for anything, it likely will be remembered as the first year that generative AI took hold of the cultural zeitgeist. It seemed everywhere you looked, you saw something about AI. At Google, the company went all-in on AI, injecting its Gemini systems into pretty much every product and service it offers.
As it turns out, this also applies to its security teams. The Google Play security team, for example, just released its annual report on what’s been happening behind the scenes as they protect us all from harmful apps, bad developers, malware, and other issues. In 2024, this team stopped more bad apps than any other year prior — 2.36 million apps, to be precise, which is wild to even think about. Google says that AI played a considerable role here.
According to Google, human app reviewers on the Google Play security team used AI in their work in 92% of cases. That’s a massive amount. Google claims AI tools help the team act more quickly and take more accurate action against developers who are trying to sneak bad apps onto the Play Store.
The Google Play security team is not the only way we are protected from bad apps, though. In 2024, Google also introduced a bunch of new security features to its Play Protect service that prevent attackers that do get through its defenses from doing any significant harm to you. Here are three examples:
- Reminder to turn on Play Protect: The Play Protect service on Android phones scans all apps — whether they come from Google Play or the wider internet — for viruses, malware, and other attacks. Sometimes, user turn this feature off so that they can install something they know to be safe. To help prevent attacks during this Play Protect downtime, Chrome now reminds users to turn Play Protect back on if it has been turned off.
- Disabling Play Protect toggle during calls: One method attackers use to exploit Android users is to call them and ask them to turn Play Protect off during the call. To combat this, Android now disables the Play Protect toggle during both regular calls as well as voice calls through popular chat apps. In order to toggle Play Protect off, you would need to end the call first, which will hopefully be enough time for the user to figure out that that’s not a great idea.
- Automatic permissions revoking: When you install and use an app, you sometimes need to grant it permissions. Sometimes, the app you’ve installed is malicious, and the permissions you’ve granted it put you in danger. Now, Play Protect automatically revokes permissions for apps like these. The user can still manually restore those permissions if they want to, but once again, this will give that malicious app less of an opening to do any damage.
Considering how many Android devices are out there (over two billion) and how open the Android ecosystem is compared to other operating systems, it’s a wonder it isn’t completely overrun with bad actors. Many people reading this have likely never faced a significant security problem on their Android device, which is a direct result of what the Google Play security team does every day.
