The company says fewer bad actors are targeting Google Play with malicious apps, a shift the tech giant attributes to increased investment in proactive security systems and AI technologies.
In its latest Android app ecosystem security report released Thursday, Google said it prevented 1.75 million infringing apps from being published on Google Play in 2025, down from 2.36 million in 2024 and 2.28 million in 2023.
The annual report offers a look at how Google keeps Android users safe by checking and monitoring apps to protect against malware, financial fraud, privacy invasions, sneaky subscriptions and other threats.
For example, Google says that in 2025 it banned more than 80,000 developer accounts that tried to publish these types of bad apps. This number also decreased year-on-year from 158,000 in 2024 and 333,000 in 2023.
Google touted how its investments in AI and other real-time defenses helped combat these kinds of threats, but also served as a deterrent.
“Initiatives such as developer verification, mandatory pre-review and testing requirements have raised the bar for the Google Play ecosystem and significantly reduced the entry paths for bad actors,” the company’s blog post explained, adding that its “multi-layered AI-based protections” “dissuade bad actors from publishing malicious apps.”
Google noted that it now performs more than 10,000 security checks on every app it publishes, and continues to recheck apps after publication. The company also integrated its latest generative AI models into the app review process, helping human reviewers spot more complex malicious patterns more quickly. Google said it plans to increase its investment in artificial intelligence in 2026 to stay ahead of emerging threats.
In addition, Google said it prevented more than 255,000 apps from gaining excessive access to sensitive user data, a number that is down from 1.3 million in 2024. The company also blocked 160 million spam ratings and reviews last year, preventing an average rating drop of 0.5 stars for apps targeted by review bombing.
Meanwhile, Android’s defense system, known as Google Play Protect, has identified more than 27 million new malicious apps and warned users or blocked the app from running. This is an increase from the 13 million non-Play Store apps identified in 2024 and the five million recorded in 2023. These increases seem to indicate that bad actors are now more likely to avoid the Play Store when targeting users with their malicious apps.