DREBIN: Effective and Explainable Detection of Android Malware in Your Pocket. Daniel Arp, Michael Spreitzenbarth, Malte Hubner, Hugo Gascon, Konrad Rieck, and CERT Siemens.PScout: Analyzing the Android Permission Specification. Over a million Android users fooled by fake WhatsApp app in official Google Play Store. New Android Trojan malware discovered in Google Play. Multi-stage malware sneaks into Google Play. Massive Android Malware Outbreak Invades Google Play Store. LibRadar 2.1.0: A tool for Android library detection. Google will soon delete apps with no privacy policies from play store. Google is using machine learning to sort good apps from bad on the Play Store. COPPA - Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.(2017). Google Has Started Removing Ad Blockers from the Play Store. Adblock Plus for Android removed from Google Play store.

Mobile Apps for Kids: Disclosures Still Not Making the Grade. Mobile Apps for Kids: current privacy disclosures are disappointing. Google 'Bouncer' Now Scanning Android Market for Malware. The experimental results have revealed various interesting findings, as well as insights for future research directions. By leveraging two app sets crawled from Google Play in 2015 (over 1.5 million) and 2017 (over 2.1 million), we have identified a set of over 790K removed apps, which are then thoroughly investigated in various aspects. To this end, this paper takes the first step to understand why Android apps are removed from Google Play, aiming at observing promising insights for both market maintainers and app developers towards building a better app ecosystem.

However, despite the significant number of removed apps, there are almost no study on the characterization of these removed apps.

In reality, we have found that the number of removed apps are actually much more than what we have expected, as almost half of all the apps have been removed or replaced from Google Play during a two year period from 2015 to 2017. As a result, policy-violating apps (e.g., malware, low-quality apps, etc.) have been removed by Google Play periodically. To ensure the quality and trustworthiness of the apps within its app market (i.e., Google Play), Google has released a series of policies to regulate app developers.

Ttpod app 2018