Google Play Store Policy Update : New Strategy To Keep Malicious Apps At Bay

Play Store is an online marketplace that was launched by Google in 2008. It is an official app store for the Android operating system that allows users to browse and download Android apps. But not all apps listed in such marketplaces are safe. There are chances that you might stumble upon a few malicious apps when browsing through. Malicious apps pose a huge threat to the credibility of genuine apps of Google Play Store. Once downloaded, malicious apps usually disguised as legitimate apps, can pave the way for infiltrating dangerous viruses such as Dresscode which can steal data from the users’ devices. It also has the ability to carry out DDoS attacks. In addition to this, there is also the threat of adware apps that can analyze and track the location of websites being visited by you on your device.

All of this would definitely make users feel wary of downloading apps from Play Store to their devices. In order to protect its users from such kind of apps, Google Play Store has now made it a point to take more time to review each app before it is made available for download on the platform. This is a very crucial step that has been taken by Google as more time for approving apps would result in more security for users.

Time to be taken by Play Store reviewing an app as per the new policy

Earlier, apps were reviewed by Play Store in about 24 hours from the time of its submission. Moreover, the Google Play Store approval time for reviewing any of the submitted Android mobile app was less than 2 hours. A longer approval time was taken only for those apps that supposedly had explicit content in them.

As per the new app review policy, developers at Google are of the opinion that approximately three days would be taken for Play Store to approve the publishing of the app on the platform. Google will now carefully look into each and every aspect of the app, all for ensuring the security of the app for its diverse set of users.

Impact of the policy on existing and new developers

Once an app is submitted for review on Play Store, the developers who provide Android app development services will get a notification about the time to be taken for the same. This review policy won’t have much of an effect on those developers who already have a number of apps to their credit published on the platform. This is due to the fact that their authenticity is already established due to the availability of their reviews and feedback from users on the Play Store. And so, chances of shorter approval time is high for these developers.

But that is not the case with apps being submitted by new developers since they would now be highly scrutinized by Google due to the fear of attachment of unwanted or unscrupulous malware to them, which could be potentially harmful for its users. Google now informs developers of the time to be taken for the review of the app only once it gets submitted. This will prove to be a big hurdle for launching the app on time. So, there might be situations arising where approval of the app by Play Store would be expected to be done in less than a day. In such cases, developers may face huge problems in meeting their delivery deadlines.

How will users benefit from this?

Users who wish to download apps from Play Store will find it much safer to do so, due to the high level of scrutinization that these apps will now have to go through before getting launched on Google Play Store. The app review policy is being very strongly implemented and it is clearly visible in the way Google has recently deleted 70,000+ apps as well as removed 85 adware-infected apps from Play Store.

In this way, Android app development companies need to properly scrutinize every mobile application that they send across for the Google Play Store review.

Blog source: https://www.algoworks.com/blog/google-play-store-policy-update/