Google Scans Six Billion Apps Daily For Security Threats

Google released its annual report on the state of Android security. It released the report for the very first time last year and promised to make it an annual thing, so it’s keeping up with that promise. Google mentions in the report that it scans six billion Android apps every single day on smartphones across the globe to try and detect security threats.

What the report doesn’t make clear is that whether these are automated scans on some 400 million devices on a daily basis or scans initiated by users, or a combination of the two.

The company goes on to mention in the report that so far this year harmful apps were installed on fewer than 0.15 percent of active devices on which only the Google Play Store is used to download apps. The figure rises to 0.5 percent once you factor in all devices that run on Android and those that download apps from third party sources.

Google highlights some of the steps that it has taken since last year to ensure that users remain protected against the risk posed by harmful applications. Steps include granular app permissions as well as making full disk encryption mandatory on most devices that run on Marshmallow.