Google kills more than 60,000 spam apps from its Play Store

Google has been gearing up with some big changes before it kicks off I/O this year. Just when it announced the new re-designed Play Store for Android, which is being rolled out to users around the world, reports of more than 60,000 spam apps being killed have surfaced. These are generally those which overlook the app store guidelines and Terms of Service, thus inviting their termination from the App Store.

These often include apps that are misleading in nature, promote piracy and generally spam applications which are harmful to the users. According to statistics from TechCrunch, apps in the “Entertainment” category, i.e. which are mostly related to mobile ringtones and MP3 were the worst affected where more than 13,000 such apps were deleted.

This is exciting because it goes a long way to show how Google is trying to enhance its spam tracking abilities and improve the automated systems which are used to track faulty applications. This move is certainly expected to be a breather for those genuine app developers who work hard to make their apps visible in the huge number of apps that are already present in the Play Store. Now that Google is getting a little more proactive at tracking down spam apps, it is obviously expected to help improve the overall quality of apps that exist in the Play Store.

While there have been some innocent victims of this policy, which sometimes automatically takes down live apps from the Play Store, it is generally perceived as a better model as opposed to the lengthy approval process that the apps in Apple ecosystem are used to. This results in not only a faster app publishing process, but also involves less hassle on part of the developer while also being more secure ever since Google introduced various security features like app verification etc.