TheGoogle Play Storeis often criticized forunjustly booting innocent developersand their apps from the platform. At the same time, the Play Store has to keep bad actors from entering the app market in the first place, and if you put this into perspective, it gets clear that falsely blocked accounts are a communication problem more than anything else. To show how successful its methods are, Google has released its annual overview of how it fought bad apps and actors in 2022.
According to thecompany’s blog post, Google blocked a whopping 1.43 million policy-violating apps from appearing on the Play Store in the first place. Google says this is partially because of its improved security features and some policy enhancements as well as better machine learning algorithms. In the process, the company suspended 173,000 bad accounts and estimates that it prevented $2 billion of fraudulent transactions. To make it harder for bad actors to enter the platform, new developers have to verify themselves with phone, email, or other methods.
In an effort to force existing apps to comply with stricter privacy policies, the company also blocked 500,000 existing apps from accessing unneeded sensitive permissions over the last three years. At the same time, Google says it’s making an effort to help developers follow the best practices. A new SDK index is supposed to help developers gauge whether including a given SDK makes sense for their apps or if there are any problematic data sharing practices.
Over the past year, Google additionally added further safeguards to keep people with Android phones safe. The company is further forcing apps to comply with newer Target APIs to show up on the Play Store, meaning that developers will have to update their apps to prevent them from working with older, potentially unsafe APIs.
There is also the data safety section in app listings that was launched last year. Here, developers need to add easily understandable information about what they’re doing with your personal data, and if they’re sharing it.Mozilla criticized this sectionfor being trust-based, meaning that developers can add what they want without Google checking it, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction that makes privacy policies easier to understand.
At the same time, Google has a lot of work left to do when it comes to supporting developers it excluded from the Play Store erroneously. The company is usually almost unreachable when developers want to put in appeals, and often enough, only developers that successfully manage to produce outrage in the media or among their followers have a chance to get their services reinstated.
