Indian Users Should Know: Harmful Apps On Google Play Doubled In 2018

As we all know, the most popular apps store Google Play is set on every Android phone. However, in comparison with Apple’s App Store, it would unlikely to win the competition in term of security. For your information, Google recently claimed that the number of potentially harmful apps (PHA) was doubled in the year 2018.

Though Google has seen the risk rates gaining year over year, the search giant still states that the Android ecosystem became safer in 2018. The reason that the company showed is due to click-fraud applications and adware and indicated a number of decrease at 31 percent if those malware apps were taken out of the calculation.

Percentage of PHA installs outside of Google Play had significantly decreased over the years

As per the report, click-fraud apps mostly targeted in some markets such as the USA, Mexico, and Brazil. It was accounted for over 50% of PHA installations derived from the Play Store. On the other hand, the percentage of trojans clocks at around 15 percent, becoming the second-largest category by install rate.

Play Protect's Interface

Beside the Play Store installs, non-Play Store installs which include malware were massively prevented in 2018. Google tool called Play Protect has wiped out at least 1.6 billion attempts of PHA installations by the year. Thanks to the protective solution, Android users will no longer be worried too much about what will happen if they download an unknown app on Play Store.

Last but not least, an outdated Android version can't protect users from those risks. In a related statistic, the latest Android 9 Pie and Android 8 Oreo devices have much less PHA installation rates compared to older operating systems such as Android 6 Marshmallow or Android 7 Nougat. Apart from those things, several Android users in India have not updated regularly!