Google Starts Scanning Android Apps 172
eldavojohn writes "A recent blog post has Android developers talking about Google finally scanning third party applications for malware. Oddly enough, Google claims this service (codenamed 'Bouncer') has been active for some time: 'The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market. This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise.' So it appears that they allow the software to be sold even before it is scanned and it also appears that no one has been bitten by a false positive from this software. Apparently Bouncer is not as oppressive as Apple's solution although given recent news its effectiveness must be questioned. Have any readers had their apps flagged or pulled by Bouncer?"
Scan for quality? (Score:1, Interesting)
It is good that they are going to finally scan for malware. But in the end Android apps need better quality control. There are so many poorly-written apps with memory leaks. I end up having to reboot my Android at least 1x/day for no explainable reason. Android is really neat but I feel like it is one big beta test that I paid money to use.
When will they add... (Score:5, Interesting)
...a more fine-grained security model and a firewall to android?
I understand it's a problem for Google if users can suddenly notice how much
is transferred to Google but I think it's the only way to go in the end.
Now? (Score:4, Interesting)
You figured something like this would have been in place from day one. Let's sell apps, but not worry about if they are loaded malware or viruses. /facepalm
Re:Does this mean ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not likely. FTA:
Once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analyzing it for known malware, spyware, and trojans. It also looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags.
That's a pretty good description of proper scanning for bad code. As TFS stated, this isn't the Apple paradigm where they want to control their users. The purpose is to maintain a profitable marketplace and platform by protecting users who keep hearing about Android malware.