Google blocked 266 million risky app installations on Android phones in 2025

With more than 3.5 active Android devices in the world, Google has an enviable market share of around 70 per cent. However, this also attracts the wrong people to prey on naive smartphone users.

While device users are advised to be cautious while venturing too deep in to shady websites and the dark net, major platform owners such as Google, Apple and Microsoft too have a responsibility of protecting the users from such threats. Time to time, they roll out security patches to fix critical vulnerabilities.

Google, over the years has made good efforts on this front. Besides having big team of security engineers, it also collaborates with big cyber security companies to build robust screening methods to weed not just existing malware-laced apps, but also block the threat actor accounts from publishing such malicious apps to enter Android ecosystem.

In 2025, Google says it prevented over 1.75 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play and banned more than 80,000 bad developer accounts that attempted to publish harmful apps.

And, Google Play prevented more than 255,000 apps that didn't meet the company's user privacy policy and sought excessive access to sensitive personal information, which were not at all required for functioning on the phone.

Google's robust screening tech is powered by latest generative AI models. They do a remarkable 10,000 safety checks in the review process, to help Google's human review team to find complex malicious patterns faster than before.

The search engine also added that it has scaled up the in-built security screening on Google Play Store to perform live scanning on more than 350 billion Android apps daily. This proactive protection constantly checks both Play apps and those from other sources to ensure they are not potentially harmful. This comes in handy when naive people get hoodwinked to side-load apps from an unknown publisher's website.

In 2025, Google's real-time scanning capability identified more than 27 million new malicious apps from outside Google Play, warning users or blocking the app to neutralise the threat.

The new tech, which is now active in 185 plus regions, which coveres more than 2.8 billion Android devices. In 2025, Google blocked 266 million risky installation attempts and helped protect users from 872,000 unique, high-risk applications.

Besides detecting bad apps, the Google Play team also keeps a tab on AI-generated spam ratings, which cause genuine apps get downranked and fake apps get good ratings.

The team was able to block 60 million spam ratings and reviews last year, including inflated and deflated reviews. Google prevented an average 0.5-star rating drop for apps targeted by review bombing, protecting our users and developers from unhelpful reviews.

Further, Google also has security mechanism to block age-inappropriate apps such as gambling, dating get advertised on phones used by teenagers.

The company has annnounced to invest more in AI-driven defenses to stay ahead of emerging threats. And, it also promises to equip Android developers with the tools they need to build apps safely.

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