Google has announced App Defense Alliance, a new initiative whose objective is to prevent and eliminate or, at least, reduce to the maximum the existing malicious applications in the Play Store. To do this, the creator of Android joins forces with other expert companies in the field of security to work together on the security of the store.
Securing the Play Store
The Play Store is the center of the Android ecosystem. The place where thousands, millions of users worldwide go to look for new applications with which to expand the possibilities of their terminals. And yes, it's true that Google's operating system gives you the option of installing APKs that you can download from other internet sites, but you already know that it's not ideal for this very security issue.
With the App Defense Alliance Google begins to collaborate with other expert security companies such as ESET, Lookout and Zimperium to detect potential security problems much earlier. Instead of having to wait until there have been thousands of downloads and then the alert goes off, this new alliance will also work on prevention.
Along with the advantages and joint use of everything that Google Play Protect entails, the alliance companies will be able to request as partners the analysis of any application that they consider a threat. With the data from this analysis, they could evaluate each case when it was reported to them directly and act accordingly together with Google in a faster and more agile way.
In other words, although these companies have always reported the results of their studies to Google, now they are going to maintain a closer relationship and that will help the speed with which problems are tackled be much greater. And therefore, user security is improved by reducing threats.
The need to restart the Play Store
While the App Defense Alliance is great news, showing that Google is serious about the security of its store and system, what the Play Store also needs is a good cleaning or reboot.
The app store for the operating system with the largest market share in the world cannot continue as before. The number of existing applications is enormous and the vast majority have not been updated, of very poor quality and with dubious practices aimed at generating money, even if it is filling the terminals with advertising and meaningless notifications.
For all this is why Google, as we have already commented on occasion, should restart its application store. We're not talking about removing everything and leaving all four of the four major developers, but it should force certain updates to stay.
The latter is done by Apple from time to time or iOS operating system jumps and it works. Many abandoned applications can be deleted and only left, in some cases, available to those who bought it at the time. This avoids the use of out-of-date or old APIs that could pose a risk to data security. Anyway, the App Defense Alliance is again a good step in the right direction.