Google’s annual blog post recapping Play Store and Android protections in 2024 is now available. It highlights new safety measures, like how Google Play Protect cannot be turned off during calls.
Google Play Protect now scans over 200 billion apps every day, which is up from 125 billion in 2023. In practice, real-time scanning in 2024 identified over 13 million new malicious apps from outside Google Play.
The “Scan apps with Play Protect” setting cannot be turned off during traditional phone calls, or voice and video calls in “popular” third-party apps. (You can find that toggle in the Play Store > account menu > Play Protect > top-right corner settings gear.)
Google temporarily removes the ability to turn off Play Protect to counter social engineering attacks: “Scammers may manipulate users into disabling Play Protect during calls to download malicious Internet-sideloaded apps.” The UI explicitly warns users: “If you’re asked to turn off app scanning, it may be a scam to try installing harmful apps on your device.”
Meanwhile, Chrome for Android will remind users to re-enable Play Protect if it has been disabled.
According to our research, more than 95 percent of app installations from major malware families that exploit sensitive permissions highly correlated to financial fraud came from Internet-sideloading sources like web browsers, messaging apps, or file managers.
Google has also expanded an enhanced fraud protection pilot to Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Finally: “Play Protect now automatically revokes permissions for potentially harmful apps, limiting their access to sensitive data like storage, photos, and camera. Users can restore app permissions at any time, with a confirmation step for added security.”
Other 2024 Google Play safety stats include:
- …prevented 2.36 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play
- …banned more than 158,000 bad developer accounts that attempted to publish harmful apps
- …we prevented 1.3 million apps from getting excessive or unnecessary access to sensitive user data.
- …over 91% of app installs on the Google Play Store now use the latest protections of Android 13 or newer.
- Apps using Play integrity features are seeing 80% lower usage from unverified and untrusted sources on average.
- Google Play Protect’s enhanced fraud protection pilots have shielded 10 million devices from over 36 million risky installation attempts, encompassing over 200,000 unique apps.
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