Google Play is a hot favorite platform for downloading various applications and games. It offers a wide selection from a huge list of innovative ideas and provides a platform for budding and experienced android developers to showcase their talents and share their works for others to enjoy.

1. Google Play:Your downloads may cost you
your security!
Google play is a hot favourite platform for downloading various applications and games. It
offers a wide selection from a huge list of innovative ideas and provides a platform for budding and
experienced android developers to showcase their talents and share their works for others to enjoy.
However, there is a catch! Not all of these developers have a positive and helpful mindset. Some have
set out to harm the general public. Google play, in fact, has sadly been riddled with malicious
applications and games infested with malware, worms and other multiple other forms of spyware,
viruses, trojans and other programs that have the potential to harm the user by stealing his/her phone’s
data and/or jeopardising the minimum safety that every cell phone/tablet requires and maximising the
risk of any type of security breach.
A two year study was conducted by researchers from the University of Sydney and
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation(CSIRO). Throughout the duration of
this research many shocking facts were discovered. The number of counterfeit apps impersonating the
original applications was alarming! To carry out the study, researchers designed a convolutional neural
net to identify similarity in app icons, thereby proving that unsuspecting users can be fooled into
downloading a fake app that has a similar image style and iconography. After discovering a million
apps by crawling the Play Store, they downloaded the APK files and grouped them by app category and
visual similarity shared by the apps. They also took into account plagiarised text descriptions of the top
10,000 most popular apps in the Play Store. The ‘multi-modal embedding’ machine learning model
found 49,608 potential counterfeits.
Android is struggling to find a solution to this problem. It is very hard for them to stop the
steam rolling rate of app submissions and more so the number of apps created to harm the users.
However they have tightened policies and have increased rejection percentages of up to 66%.The fact
that the research was conducted on what should be one of the most legitimate app stores is a cause for
concern. If you are an Android device owner, make sure you verify it is indeed the app you’re looking
for by checking out ratings and reviews. Most importantly, always check the permissions on the
application’s page page and confirm they’re not asking for far more than they need to function.