Google's Play Protect mobile threat protection service blocked the installation of over 1.9 billion malicious apps downloaded from non-Play Store sources in 2019.

During 2017 and 2018, Google Play Protect has also prevented the installation of another 3.2 billion Potentially Harmful Application (PHAs) — as Google refers to malicious apps — from outside of the Play Store per Android Year in Review security reports.

The stats go as far as the beginning of 2017 because that's when Google Play Protect was introduced, during the Google I/O 2017 on May 17, 2017, with Google starting full deployment of the built-in malware protection to all Android devices during July 2017.

Today, Google Play Protect is deployed on over 2.5 billion active Android devices as described in the Android security center.

Backed by Google’s machine learning, it’s always adapting and improving. Every day, it automatically scans all of the apps on Android phones and works to prevent harmful apps from ever reaching them, making it the most widely deployed mobile threat protection service in the world.

100 billion apps scanned every day

Google Play Protect scans over 100 billion apps for malware every day, up 50 billion compared to 2018 and providing users with info about potential security issues and providing details on actions needed to keep their devices secure.

In 2019, Google worked on strengthening policies to better protect families and children and joined efforts with ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium through the App Defense Alliance to improve malicious Android app detection on submission blocking them before they get published on the Play Store.

The App Defense Alliance couldn't have come sooner given that malware managed to infiltrate Google's app ecosystem more and more often notwithstanding the company's efforts to stop this evolving trend. (1, 2, 3)

Google also improved the developer approval process last year and enhanced the machine-learning detection systems used by Google Play Protect to examine Android app code, metadata, and user engagement signals for suspicious behavior and content.

Google working to improve Play Store's safety

All these efforts made the Play Store a much cleaner app distribution market seeing that Google's vetting team was able to stop more than 790,000 policy-violating app submissions before being published.

Google is also committed to investing more to protect the security of Android devices by strengthening app safety policies designed to protect users' privacy, by blocking repeat offenders and detecting bad actors faster, as well as identifying and removing Android apps featuring harmful content and behaviors.

"Such a thriving ecosystem can only be achieved and sustained when trust and safety is one of its key foundations," Google Play & Android App Safety product manager Andrew Ahn said.

"Over the last few years we’ve made the trust and safety of Google Play a top priority, and have continued our investments and improvements in our abuse detection systems, policies, and teams to fight against bad apps and malicious actors."