We tend to take services like Google Play Protect for granted. This is the service that works behind the scenes to make sure that every app you download from the Play Store is safe. Google just delivered a report to show how much Play Protect protected us in 2024.
In case you don’t know what Play Protect is, it’s the platform that Google uses to protect people who download apps from the Google Play Store. It scans apps and makes sure that you’re not downloading any malware or other malicious apps. It’s not perfect, as there are those apps that make it through. We hear stories about new Android malware that slips through the cracks. However, the number of predatory apps would be exponentially higher without it.
Google showed how many malicious apps Play Protect shielded us from in 2024
Scammers and hackers are getting more clever each year, so they work hard to get you to download their apps. However, while they’re evolving each year, Google is also evolving. Each year, we get a report from Google telling us just how many apps it swatted from the Play Store.
In 2024, Google kept a whopping 2.36 million malicious apps from even making it to the Play Store. These are apps that broke the company’s policies. When you think about it, if you’re a person who frequently downloads apps, that’s 2 million fewer apps to worry about. Along with that, the company actually banned over 158,000 accounts that tried to publish malicious apps to the platform.
Google’s protection extends apps that you have already downloaded. According to the company, it prevented more than 1.3 million apps on the store from accessing sensitive data that they shouldn’t. These are apps that typically ask for permissions on your phone that they shouldn’t. It’s the classic story of the Solitaire app asking you to access your contacts.
It’s not just on the Google Play Store
Aside from protecting users from apps published on the Google Play Store, Google also keeps people safe from apps that they sideload. The company scans more than 200 billion apps each day, and it recently began scanning apps at the code level. It doesn’t matter if they’re from the Play Store or not.
Because of this, the company was able to protect users from 13 million malicious apps that didn’t come from the Play Store. This just shows how much work Google puts into protecting Android users.
