Google said its investments in artificial intelligence and real-time defenses helped curb malicious apps, fraud, and privacy violations across the Google Play and Android ecosystems during 2025. These efforts come at a time when malicious actors are using artificial intelligence to develop more sophisticated attack methods, according to Vijaya Kaza, Google’s Vice President and General Manager of App and Ecosystem Trust.
Google prevented the publication of more than 1.75 million apps that violated Google Play policies and banned more than 80,000 developer accounts that attempted to publish malicious apps. The company says that developer identity verification, mandatory pre-review checks, and testing requirements reduced the avenues available to abusive actors seeking to enter the platform, while new tools help compliant developers build policy-compliant apps.
Enhancing App and Privacy Checks
Google Play apps undergo more than 10,000 security checks, with reviews continuing after publication. During 2025, Google integrated its latest generative models into the review process to help human review teams detect complex malicious patterns more quickly.
The company also prevented more than 255,000 apps from gaining excessive access to users’ sensitive data and continued tightening its privacy policies. Tools such as Play Policy Insights in Android Studio and the Data Safety section provide developers with guidance on reducing requests for sensitive permissions and submitting the required usage disclosures while building an app.
Regarding ratings and reviews, anti-spam systems blocked 160 million fake or manipulated ratings and reviews, including cases intended to raise or lower app ratings. Google said it also prevented an average half-star decline in the ratings of apps targeted by review-bombing campaigns.
The company added new layers of protection for children and families, aiming to prevent younger users from discovering or downloading apps associated with activities such as gambling or dating.
Expanding Google Play Protect
Google Play Protect scans more than 350 billion Android apps every day, whether the apps are downloaded from Google Play or other sources. During the past year, real-time scanning detected more than 27 million new malicious apps from outside Google Play, warning users or blocking the apps when necessary.
Google expanded its enhanced fraud protection feature to 185 markets, covering more than 2.8 billion Android devices, after its pilot launch in Singapore. The feature analyzes apps being installed from external sources, such as a web browser or messaging apps, when they request sensitive permissions that could be misused in financial fraud. During 2025, it blocked 266 million risky installation attempts and helped protect users from 872,000 high-risk apps.
Google also introduced protection against fraud during calls, temporarily disabling the ability to turn off Google Play Protect while a call is in progress. The aim is to prevent attackers from tricking users into disabling the device’s defenses and then installing a malicious app during the conversation.
New Tools for Developers
Google made improvements to the Play Integrity API, through which apps and games perform more than 20 billion verification operations each day to protect against abuse and unauthorized access. The 2025 updates included adding hardware-backed signals that are difficult to forge, in-app prompts to help users address issues such as network errors, and the experimental launch of device recall to identify repeat abusive actors even after a device reset, while preserving user privacy.
Google plans to open Android developer identity verification to all developers this year, following the early-access period, while providing a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists that allows them to distribute their apps to a limited number of devices without the full verification requirements. In Android 16, developers can protect private information such as banking login details with a single line of code. The protection has also been integrated automatically into some apps to help limit tapjacking attacks.