Google has always been clear about its policies in terms of building applications and the responsibilities of the developers. It is because of such policies the Android devices are becoming more secure every day. Despite the clarifications on the policies, there are still a few developers who continue to make malicious applications. Google in a blog post announced that it has removed about 600 applications from Play Store. The applications were removed as they violated its policies. They had interrupting ads and also allowed interstitial policies.
The search engine is currently making efforts to restrict such applications from the Play Store as they cause disturbance to a huge number of smartphones and tablets. Google considers this as a part of a big mobile ad fraud and has also labeled it as an industry-wide challenge that harms the advertisers and the users.
A report has mentioned that the applications that have malicious advertisements, are mostly targeted at the English-speaking users that are based out of Asia. Senior Product Manager, Per Bjorke at Google confirmed about 4.5 billion installations of the malicious applications but did not reveal the name of the application or the developers. The blog post from Google has also clearly mentioned that the developers who have been behind the development of all the malicious apps will be banned from Ad Manager and AdMob.
There are many developers who have also taken a similar action but the search engine is still not sure if they would also get in to the same effort. Talking about the disruptive ads, the company has described them as the applications that have ads that interfere with the usage of the users and also interfere in the usability. The ads not just appear but also surface when the users are performing an action. The current technologies with Google are not perfect but it is in the course of being capable enough to prevent future threats.
Photo Credits: LiveMint
