The Google Play Protectfailed the tests of the German company AV-Test for real threats, with a final score of zero, since it failed to effectively protect the system from malicious programs.
Google Play Protect, which comes built-in to Android, was first introduced at Google I/O in May 2017, and the company began rolling it out to all Android devices in July of that year. To date, Google is running on over 2.5 billion active devices.
Do not select Google Play Protect
According to AV-Test's results, Google Play Protect managed to detect just over a third of the approximately 6,700 malware samples the lab uses to conduct its tests. This means that 4,000 threats were able to infect an Android device without being detected by Play Protect.
Google Play Protect was able to detect 37% of the 3,300 recently discovered samples – no more than 2 to 24 hours – in the real‑time test and 33.1% in the reference test that used 3,300 malware samples that were circulating for up to 4 weeks.
This performance was the lowest of all other antivirus services , which had a malware detection rate of 98%
Additionally, Google Play Protect incorrectly flagged 30 harmless apps as a threat to test devices.
Of all the antivirus services, Antiy, Bitdefender, Cheetah Mobile, NortonLifeLock, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky achieved the perfect 100% detection rate.
“The current test shows that Android users should not rely solely on Play Protect”, says AV-Test.
AV-Test's comparison only evaluated apps for consumers, but it will also test enterprise security apps and release the results in April 2020.
This is not the first time Google Play Protect has failed AV-Test's tests. In October 2017, shortly after its release, it again recorded the lowest score among all other antivirus protection services.
