Fewer unhealthy actors are focusing on Google Play with malicious apps, the corporate says, a shift that the tech large credit with its elevated investments in proactive security methods and AI expertise.
In its newest Android app ecosystem security report launched on Thursday, Google mentioned it prevented 1.75 million policy-violating apps from being printed on Google Play in 2025, down from 2.36 million in 2024 and a pair of.28 million in 2023.
The annual report presents a have a look at how Google is protecting Android customers secure by reviewing and monitoring apps to guard towards malware, monetary fraud, privateness invasions, sneaky subscriptions, and different threats.
For example, Google says it banned greater than 80,000 developer accounts in 2025 that had tried to publish most of these unhealthy apps. That determine can also be down year-over-year from 158,000 in 2024, and 333,000 in 2023.
Google touted how its investments in AI and different real-time defenses have helped battle these kinds of threats, but additionally how they served as a deterrent.
“Initiatives like developer verification, obligatory pre-review checks, and testing necessities have raised the bar for the Google Play ecosystem, considerably lowering the paths for unhealthy actors to enter,” the corporate’s weblog publish defined, including that its “AI-powered, multi-layer protections” have been “discouraging unhealthy actors from publishing malicious apps.”
Google famous it now runs over 10,000 security checks on each app it publishes and continues to recheck apps after publication. The corporate has additionally built-in its newest generative AI fashions into the app evaluate course of, which has helped human reviewers discover extra advanced malicious patterns quicker. Google mentioned it plans to extend its AI investments in 2026 to remain forward of rising threats.
As well as, Google mentioned it prevented greater than 255,000 apps from gaining extreme entry to delicate consumer knowledge, a determine that’s down from 1.3 million in 2024. The corporate additionally blocked 160 million spam scores and opinions final 12 months, and prevented a mean 0.5-star score drop for apps focused by evaluate bombing.
In the meantime, Android’s protection system, often known as Google Play Defend, recognized greater than 27 million new malicious apps, and warned customers or blocked the app from working. That’s a rise from the 13 million non-Play Retailer apps recognized in 2024 and 5 million seen in 2023. These will increase appear to recommend that unhealthy actors at the moment are extra typically avoiding the Play Retailer when focusing on customers with their malicious apps.
