Earlier experts revealed that compared to iOS, Android devices are more vulnerable to malware attacks. Over the past few years, security researchers found hundreds of malicious apps in market places and most of these apps were found in the Play Store and after notifying Google. the company which owns the app downloading platform removed those compromised apps.
As per the previous reports, even though Google bans hundreds of apps every week from Play Store, the app downloading platform is known as one of the biggest stores that hosted malicious apps. But a new mobile threat report revealed that not Play Store, there is another platform which hosted most malware-infested apps in 2019.
Availability of malicious apps in market places
Recently Google mentioned that they have been taking steps to safeguard the app distribution platform from all kinds of malware and frauds. The tech giant stated that they have successfully prevented over 1.9 billion malware installs from non-Google Play sources in 2019 and kept over 790,000 policy-violating apps away from the Play Store.
Despite all efforts, threat actors manage to find a loophole to introduce malicious apps in Play Store. Recently a threat report by RiskIQ's revealed that Play Store comes second for hosting maximum malware-infested apps. The report mentioned that 9Game.com, which offers free Android games as the biggest app store, hosted the most malicious apps in 2019.
Malware apps on app stores
It should be noted that last year, more than 61,669 malware apps were uploaded to the 9Game portal. The team behind this research also noted that this margin showed 1.4 times more malicious apps than the Google Play Store.
9Game is also the app store with the highest number of malicious apps, while the Play Store didn't even come anywhere in the top five list. The surprising fact is as per the threat report Xiaomi app store was listed in the third position, while the top five stores with most malicious apps include Feral, Vmall and Qihoo 360's Zhushou.
However, this report also mentioned that new apps on these market places are mostly coming from Chinese developers. Apkgk, Apkpureco and Androidappsapk- these top three app stores witnessed such app uploads in 2019, mostly from China, while in the same list Google and Apple ranked fourth and fifth respectively.
