Earlier this month, Google removed 85 malicious apps from the Google Play Store. In particular, an illegal adware app disguised itself as a remote game control emulator and was downloaded over 9 million times from the Google Play Store. So far, and in less than a month, a new set of apps have been spotted violating the Play Store's rules.
How exactly did these applications work?
Worst of all, 15 GPS-based apps were running on the Play Store and were using the company’s mobile platform to scam Android users and make money from them. These apps, which include GPS Route Finder, GPS Live Street Maps, and Maps GPS Navigation, did not provide any additional services of their own to users. Instead, they used Google Maps or its API to show ads to users. Additionally, some of these apps were seeking permissions to access users’ contacts, messages, and call details.
A security researcher tweeted that these apps pretend to be navigation apps that provide all the necessary features, but in reality, all they do is create a useless “layer” between the user and the Google Maps. In simple terms, once users download these apps and tap on drive or navigate or select some other option, Google Maps opens to help users. However, in addition to displaying navigation-related information, they bombarded users’ smartphone screens with lots of ads! Also, some of them asked users to pay a small amount to get rid of the ads. From the beginning, the goal was to collect money through deception. First, users would download the apps, then lots of ads would appear, and finally they had to pay to get rid of them.
However, security researchers have been extremely impressed by the fact that they were downloaded about 50 million times from the Google Play Store, as some of these apps did not even have an official app icon! Google was immediately informed of these developments about a month ago but no official action has been announced by the company yet.
