- Kyle Chua
Google's Real-Time Scanning Feature To Protect You From Malicious Apps
Updated: Dec 18, 2023
Google is rolling out new security features to help prevent the installation of malicious apps on your Android devices.
The search engine giant on Wednesday, 18 October announced that it would be improving the security capabilities of Google Play Protect with "real-time scanning at the code-level" to fight novel malicious apps. The new feature can recommend a real-time app scan when installing apps that have never been scanned before to help detect emerging threats.
In case you're unfamiliar, Google Play Protect is a malware-detection and protection service that's built-in and enabled by default on all Android devices with Google Play services. The service scans over 125 billion apps daily to protect you from installing harmful apps on your devices.
However, with cybercriminals now employing more sophisticated methods to skirt detection, such as polymorphic malware that can change its identifiable features, it's important to improve the protection of devices to remain safe against scams.
The new real-time scanning feature can pull important signals from and and send them to the Play Protect backend infrastructure for a code-level evaluation. Once that's done, you'll receive a result, letting you know if an app looks safe to install or if it's potentially harmful.
The security protections and machine learning algorithms learn from each app submitted to Google for review. They do so by analysing the thousands of signals they pull from apps and compare the behaviour with that of others. Google notes that Play Protect improves with each identified app, enabling it to continue strengthening its protections for the Android ecosystem.
The roll out of the new feature adds to Google’s multi-layered defence approach, when it comes to the security and privacy of Android users.
Google has started rolling the new Play Protect feature out to all Android devices with Google Play services in select countries, starting with India, with other regions to follow in the coming months.
Google has announced that it would be improving the security capabilities of Google Play Protect with real-time scanning at the code-level to combat novel malicious apps.
The new feature can recommend a real-time app scan when installing apps that have never been scanned before to help detect emerging threats.
Scanning allows the service to pull important signals from apps and send them to the Play Protect backend infrastructure for a code-level evaluation, returning with a result that tells you whether an app is safe to install or not.