Google Needs To Implement A Stronger App Approval Process

By Author: Kelly Burby
Total Articles: 349
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Google's Android has totally changed the way third-party developers have been building applications for mobile platforms. Because Android was introduced as an open-source mobile OS, third-party developers have the complete support of Google to build their freelance projects and submit them to Google Play Store. When it comes to approve an application, Google verifies its authenticity for security reasons. Google's moderation team manually checks each app submitted to the store.

In spite of the fact that Google does also has an app approval process where moderation is performed manually, in April this year, about 32 apps found to be infected in Play Store. These apps were estimated for infecting as many as 5 million devices in Europe and Russia by putting the privacy of users at risk.

So Android has been marked as one of the most vulnerable mobile operating systems. According to the study conducted by F-secure, there are more than 136 types ...
... of known threats to Google's Android OS. These treats have been sorted to target Android OS and cause privacy related problems. In the same reports, it was also discovered that there has been a rise of 50% malware attacks for Android in last quarter alone. This data makes one thing vary clear – Android continues to be an easy target of attackers and hackers who make malicious application and an easily get them approved in Google Play.

It has been mentioned in the Play Store's guidelines that Google does not approve such apps which may stake the privacy and private information of users and make devices vulnerable. An article of Venture Beat recently informed about an Android trojan, which if installed by users, can control most of basic functionalities of the device. It can make phone calls, retrieve all the stored passwords and even access to and read information stored in a device.

This issue was first brought into light by Blubox, which informed that discrepancies in the app approval process is the major cause behind the spread of malicious software. There are still a large number of infected applications available in Google Play Store.

Google still needs a strong policy for moderating apps. The search engine giant knows that it has infected apps in its app store as a lot of third-party auditors keep inputing this information in their blogs and articles.

What Google needs to do is implement a strong app moderation or approval process. The people working behind Play Store need to focus more on checking the functionality and back-end process of every app submitted to store. They also need to properly check how the processes of app deal witch data and whether or not the app is compromising the privacy of users by any means.