There are several apps which have been deleted by the tech giant Google over the years due to reliability issues. Now, Google has once again removed one of the most popular apps from the play store as part of the larger crackdown on apps from Cheetah Mobile.
Google removed AnTuTu
As per the reports the popular app, Antutu is no longer available in Play store. This app is used by most of the Android smartphone brands such as Realme and Xiaomi. Other than this famous smartphone application, the tech giant has also removed two other famous apps with Antutu branding from the app download platform.
The Android Police reported that Google has removed all the Antutu apps from the platform which includes Antutu Benchmark and Antutu 3DBench. These newly removed apps were available on the Play Store till February 22, but now when an Android user will try to find these apps, the Play Store will showcase "no result found."
Google bans 600 apps
Recently, Google put a ban on 600 apps for displaying disruptive advertising behaviour that the tech giant labelled as mobile ad fraud. The tech company noted that Cheetah Mobile has been one of the biggest troublemakers as it has created about 45 of those newly banned apps.
After removing these apps, Per Bjorke, senior product manager for Ad Traffic Quality at Google said that "Mobile ad fraud is an industry-wide challenge that can appear in many different forms with a variety of methods, and it has the potential to harm users, advertisers and publishers. At Google, we have dedicated teams focused on detecting and stopping malicious developers that attempt to defraud the mobile ecosystem. As part of these efforts, we take action against those who create seemingly innocuous apps, but which actually violate our ads policies."
Cheetah Mobile
The developer, Cheetah Mobile has been accused of committing Ad Fraud in several apps earlier also. They are perhaps one of the most infamous development companies among our users because of their suspicious practice of collecting users' data and serving tons of sketchy advertisements.
It should be noted that "Clean Master," is a popular app by Cheetah Mobile with more than one billion downloads. It is designed to clean the cache on an Android device. But as per early research from Kochava, the experts had accused Cheetah Mobile of using additional permissions in apps like Clean Master as part of an ad fraud scheme.
