Google now scans Android apps in real-time to prevent malware.

Through its security system, known as Play Protect, Google will start implementing new real-time scanning features in the system to make it more challenging for malicious Android apps that employ polymorphism. As a result, Android device users should be able to experience a significant reduction in malware infections in the system.

Without a doubt, it’s a significant step for Google and Android. Furthermore, Google Play Protect evolves even further with this measure, now being a much more comprehensive service capable of providing an additional layer of security for devices using the mentioned operating system. It’s worth mentioning that this new real-time scanning feature of the service is already available in some countries around the world and will be gradually rolled out to the rest in the coming months.

Malicious apps will have a harder time from now on on Android

While apps from the Google Play Store usually don’t pose any threats to Android devices, the situation changes when it comes to external apps since they can easily be malicious and find ways to bypass security platforms. With these new features from Mountain View, this should change, at least to a great extent.

This new real-time scanning by Google Play Protect is effective for apps downloaded from the Play Store, Android’s app store, and APKs downloaded from external sources outside the mentioned system. When these malicious apps are installed on a mobile phone or tablet, they fetch additional code from an external resource, completing their functionality during the subsequent verification phase, where there is no way to stop them. Now, with the new features of Google’s service, behavioral signals from the apps can be extracted.

Those signals will be sent to the backend infrastructure of Play Protect, where they will undergo a very thorough analysis to determine how secure that application really is. Specifically, the company states the following: ‘Our security protections and machine learning algorithms learn from every app submitted to Google for review, and we analyze thousands of signals and compare the behavior of the apps.

Therefore, this real-time scanning of Google’s security service for Android will make better use of static and dynamic analysis, as well as heuristics and machine learning, to identify patterns that may lead to malware. It is hoped that this measure will have a significant impact and succeed in reducing the amount of malware that infiltrates Android every day. However, just as security systems evolve, new techniques may also be employed to evade these systems.