Android malware installs decreased by nearly 50% in 2014, says Google

Security isn’t to be taken lightly, especially when it comes to dealing with sensitive consumer information. To shed some light on its recent efforts, Google released a whitepaper earlier today that explains what exactly the Android security team has been working on in the past year. The report, titled Android Security State of the Union, analyzes billions of data points gathered throughout 2014 that detail the current state of Android security.

The full report is quite lengthy, but there are a few main points Google would like to highlight. For starters, the company says the worldwide rate of Android malware installs decreased by nearly 50% throughout 2014. And over the entire year, fewer than 1% of all Android devices contained any type of harmful application at all. Of the devices that only installed applications from the Google Play Store, fewer than .15% contained a harmful app.

In addition, the company explains that over 1 billion devices are protected by its Verify Apps service, which now scans over 200 million devices per day. Lastly, the Android team and all affiliates responded to 79 externally reported security issues overall, and over 25,000 applications in the Play Store were updated following security notifications from Google.

Now, all of these numbers Google has laid to us out are quite broad, especially given the company’s meaning of the word malware (or Potentially Harmful Apps). But if you are interested in getting some more information on specifics, Google has detailed everything in a very lengthy report, which you can find here.

Google has already made clear its intentions to focus more on reviewing policy violations in Google Play in hopes to reduce malware even further over the next year. Even though many users are still concerned with Android security, the company hopes this new report will bring those worries to an end.