Google Play Store removes 7,00,000 apps from its platform for violating guidelines; takes help of machine learning for this task

In a bid to bring safer experience for users, Google Play Store has removed 7,00,000 apps which have violated the app store’s policies. [caption id=“attachment_4328515” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Google Play Store[/caption] According to the Play Store blog , these apps were either copycats, inappropriate content, or potentially harmful applications (PHA) such as malware which can potentially affect a smartphone’s Android software. However, according to its findings, the number of PHAs were of a small number. Meanwhile, 99 percent of the content which was removed was inappropriate and mostly abusive in nature. Play Store claims to have removed such content even before anyone could install them. Google has not only removed these apps but also rejected the app developers who were involved in the developing these offensive apps. Those app developers who were repeatedly developing such apps were removed from the platform. The blog post says that in 2017 it has taken down 70 percent more apps as compared to 2016. Machine learning models and techniques were some of the ways in which these apps were removed. According to Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, Google Play, “We’ve also developed new detection models and techniques that can identify repeat offenders and abusive developer networks at scale. This resulted in taking down of 100,000 bad developers in 2017, and made it more difficult for bad actors to create new accounts and attempt to publish yet another set of bad apps.” Google Play Store had come under the radar for harbouring apps which were malicious and were hosting ads which had pornographic content in them. It took down 60 gaming apps from Play Store and were available to both adults and children.