Google is on a mission to bridge the safety gap that currently sets Apple’s iPhone apart from its Android competition. Lots of chatter this week about the release date for Android 15, which will bring live threat detection—AI-powering Play Protect to flag dangerous apps in real time on devices. Google’s other headline act is a cull of the Play Store itself, and it’s now clear the store is changing more than ever before.
Since the updated policy went live on August 31, raising the bar for an app to access Play Store, I’ve been looking for indicators as to the scale of impact this might have. The question remains the extent to which this will genuinely reduce the threat from trivial, poorly developed apps used as trojans to sneak malicious code onto phones.
We’ve already seen a report from Statista, which showed that as of June 2024, the number of Play Store apps available was down a almost a million apps year-on-year, albeit at 1.7 million titles, there remains an expansive attack surface as the constant game of cat and mouse between bad actors and Google’s security team continues.
As notable as that is, the latest Statista report is even more stark, showing the number of apps released monthly through Play Store is coming down rapidly. While this shows September is “a notable decrease compared to the previous month,” it’s even more marked over a year ago—29,000 now versus nearly 80,000 then. Nothing though as compared to March 2019, when more than 140,000 apps were released.
While this is all very welcome, actively removing errant apps, raising the bar for new apps and updates, and screening. app behavior on devices, the onus remains on users to reflect on which apps they allow onto their devices and actively running their own app culls periodically, to remove apps no longer in use or which err on the trivial side.
Google produces a helpful guide as to the “four pillars of Android app quality” by which one can judge what should make the cut. The warning signs are obvious—poor user experience, features that fail to load, general feel of poor development, over-stretching on permission requests, lack of genuinely useful or entertaining utility.
All of this has added significant at the moment with Google pushing users to stick rigidly to Play Store and to avoid sideloading apps more than ever before. While that approach prompts mixed feelings across an Android community raised on materially lower restrictions than iPhone, to say nothing of recent legal challenges, it’s beyond doubt that sideloading carries high risks for users and their devices.