Google last year rejected 2.28 mn apps for violating Play Store policies

Tech giant says it has strengthened its processes for taking in and reviewing developers

Tech giant Google last year blocked 2.28 million apps worldwide from being published on its Play Store, citing violations of its policies. It had rejected 1.43 million apps for the same reason in 2022.

The company, in 2023, also banned 333,000 “bad accounts” from Play for violations and malware. Google said it had strengthened its processes for on-boarding and reviewing developers, requiring more identity information when developers first establish their Play accounts.

More than 200,000 app submissions were rejected or remediated to ensure proper use of sensitive permissions, such as background location or SMS access, according to a company blog post.

Some 1.5 million services that did not meet the company’s latest application programming interfaces – a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other – are no longer available in the Play Store to new users who have updated their devices to Google’s latest Android version.

Google said it worked with providers of software development kit (SDK) – a set of tools to build software for a particular platform –to limit sensitive data access and sharing and strengthen privacy.

“We have also significantly expanded the Google Play SDK Index, which now covers the SDKs used in almost six million apps across the Android ecosystem. This valuable resource helps developers make better SDK choices, boosts app quality, and minimises integration risks,” said the company.

For data privacy, Google now requires account initiation and data deletion from within apps and online.

“This web requirement is especially important so that a user can request account and data deletion without having to reinstall an app. To simplify the user experience, we have also incorporated this as a feature within the Data Safety section of the Play Store,” it said.