Google announces 1 million apps but how bad

Google has announced that its app store has reached 1 million apps for mobile devices. But how many of them are legitimate, and how many are bad?

While Microsoft has just passed with barely 100,000 applications on its Windows Store, Hugo Barra, vice president for product development at Google Apps, said his platform Play has reached the symbolic number of a million apps. Google confirmed that the next step is to create an apps optimized for tablets on the store section to help tablet users, more and more, to find the best applications. The company also celebrated the fact that for the first time, Android tablets have dethroned the iPad in units delivered to retailers with 67% share of the international market, at least for this quarter.

If the Mountain View company can be satisfied with beating Apple, whose App Store is still "stuck" with 900,000 apps, a Symantec report focuses light on important questions about the validity of certain applications currently available Google Play. The publisher specializing in security reveals that since early 2013, a continuous flow of 1200 applications suspicious was found. This software, which appear on the store and are available for several days before being reported as inappropriate or as scams are designed to extort money or obtain personal information about users.

Google does not clean fast enough

In a post where he explains these frauds, Joji Hamada, a researcher at Symantec adds that although these apps are quickly deleted, they are still available long enough to scam users and because of the way they are encoded, they often appear in the first choice when certain keywords are typed:. "Their tactics of abuse of the search function on Google Play allows their apps up at the top of the list of keyword search A test conducted by Symantec found that 21 the first 24 results were actually malicious apps. "

In addition, the techniques used by the creators of malicious apps evolve. Symantec has discovered a number of apps, when analyzed by a software are considered reliable but are actually created to launch the browser to a suspect site. This can be noticed that if a person makes the analysis instead of software: a slightly obsessive approach is made by Apple to validate apps before putting them on the App Store.