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Less Than 1% of Android Devices Affected by Potentially Harmful Apps

April 6, 2015

Stated another way, potentially harmful apps (PHA) are present on less than one percent of devices running Google’s Android operating system. Google announced this report after analyzing the data it collects from Android devices. Since 2012, Google has been collecting the data via a feature called Verify Apps, which checks your installed applications irrespective of the download source. Originally, Verify Apps only scanned at application installation, but since March 2014 it scans applications in the background to flag applications that may have been safe upon installation and later updated to include malware. Verify Apps was again updated in October 2014 to also identify whether apps were installed from Google Play or were sideloaded.

The major message from the results is to install only applications from trusted sources such as Google Play. Rooted devices or those configured to allow sideloading had significantly larger amounts of PHA than those only utilizing Google Play.

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