Google have published a new article on their security blog highlighting their Play performance in 2022. It's a refreshing counter to the daily drivel oozing from tabloids about occasional apps making it through the net.

In 2022, Google Play:
• Prevented 1.43 million policy-violating apps from being published on the store
• Banned 173k bad actors from publishing apps
• Added more requirements for developer sign-up to deter the attempted publishing of bad apps
• Added more requirements for app types known for being abused
• .. and more

Tying in to the annual targetSDK requirements, and the newer changes that block very, very old apps from being installed in Android, and the last year was pretty good.

I will absolutely take a moment to call out the policies though. At least one of those 1.43m policy violations was an app I worked on that got blocked for 3 weeks across 10+ revisions and involved multiple escalations to AE and Play support because of a wording issue for a permission. Legitimate developers get caught up in Google's nondescript and super granular policies frequently, and seeing numbers like that has me wondering how many of those are genuinely bad apps..

Very good read though, check it out!

Source: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/04/how-we-fought-bad-apps-and-bad-actors.html

#androidenterprise