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Google Bans Over 600 Apps & Their Developers Amidst Play Store Crackdown

Google Bans Over 600 Apps & Their Developers Amidst Play Store Crackdown

Thursday, February 27, 2020 IST

Recently, Google removed over 600 Android apps from its listings amidst the Play Store crackdown. It also banned the developers of those Android apps.

Recently, Google plans to crack down on Android app developers who break app store rules by showing out-of-app advertisements. While doing so, they have banned over 600 Android apps from the Play Store for breaking the Google Play Store policy.

Out-of-app advertisements are the advertisements that originate from one app but appear on top of other apps or the device’s home screen. The users also do not have a clue about the origin of the apps.

The new advertisement rules enforcement came after Google removed over 600 Android apps from the play store and banned the respective developers of the apps. Google also banned the developers of those Android apps from their monetisation platforms like Google Admob and Google Ad Manager.

The second ban that has been imposed on the developers of the Android apps would prevent app makers from monetising their apps even through third-party sources. Google’s senior product manager, Per Bjorke said that they intervened after they came to know about the new techniques used by developers of Android apps to show out-of-app advertisements to users.

He also said that they have recently developed an innovative machine-learning based approach to identify instances when apps show out-of-context ads, leading to the enforcement that they in-turn announced.

According to reports, Cheetah Mobile is one of the names that was banned from the Play Store for ad fraud. Reports say that Cheetah Mobile is one of the biggest developers of Android apps in the world. Earliest reports against Cheetah Mobile were filed in 2018, for indulging in some forms of ad fraud.

Besides the enactment of the ban, Google also talked about its plans to crack down on advertisement rule infringers even further. They also detailed a three-step plan to ensure that the Android Ad ecosystem and the Play Store remain healthy. In the three-step procedure, the first step would be the continuous crackdown of Android Apps and developers from the Play Store.

Then, Google said that they plan to publish better tools which let the developers know that there are some limits in which they tend to annoy the Android users. In the final step, Google mentioned that they are planning to change how the Android OS works to cope with this new wave of out-of-app advertisements. However, Google did not elaborate on any of these changes.