The Android ecosystem is a thriving global community built on trust, giving billions of users the confidence to download the latest apps. In order to maintain that trust, we’re focused on ensuring that apps do not cause real-world harm, such as malware, financial fraud, hidden subscriptions, and privacy invasions. As bad actors leverage AI to change their tactics and launch increasingly sophisticated attacks, we’ve deepened our investments in AI and real-time defenses over the last year to maintain the upper hand and stop these threats before they reach users.
Upgrading Google Play’s AI-powered, multi-layered user protections
We’ve seen a clear impact from these safety efforts on Google Play. In 2025, we 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. These figures demonstrate how our proactive protections and push for a more accountable ecosystem are discouraging bad actors from publishing malicious apps, while our new tools help honest developers build compliant apps more easily. Initiatives like developer verification, mandatory pre-review checks, and testing requirements have raised the bar for the Google Play ecosystem, significantly reducing the paths for bad actors to enter.
User safety is at the core of everything we build. Over the years, we’ve continually introduced ways to help users stay safe and make informed app choices — from parental controls to data safety transparency and app badges. We’re constantly improving our policies and protections to encourage safe, high-quality apps on Google Play and stop bad actors before they cause harm.
Apps on Google Play undergo rigorous reviews for safety and compliance with our policies. Last year, we shared that Google Play runs over 10,000 safety checks on every app we publish, and we continue to check and recheck apps after they’ve been published. In 2025, we continued scaling our defenses even further by:
- Boosting AI-enhanced app detection: We integrated Google’s latest generative AI models into our review process, helping our human review team continue to find complex malicious patterns faster.
- Preventing unnecessary access to sensitive data: We prevented over 255,000 apps from getting excessive access to sensitive user data and continued to strengthen our privacy policies. Our commitment to privacy-forward app development, supported by tools like Play Policy Insights in Android Studio and Data safety section, has empowered developers to continue to: minimize privacy-sensitive permission requests, and prioritize the user in their design choices.
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