Google LLC revealed today that it had to remove more than 700,000 bad apps from Google Play last year, 70 percent more than it removed in 2016 — but the company insisted it’s not as bad as it sounds.

More precisely, Google said that last year it halved the chance that a user would install a bad app. Andrew Ahn, a product manager at Google Play, explained in a blog post that although malware and other harmful apps may be on the rise, Google is also getting better at catching them.

“In fact, 99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them,” Ahn said. “This was possible through significant improvements in our ability to detect abuse — such as impersonation, inappropriate content, or malware — through new machine learning models and techniques.”

Some of the most commonly removed apps were copycats that try to pass themselves off as famous apps. Google also pulled tens of thousands of apps for having inappropriate content, which were flagged by Google’s machine learning algorithms and then removed by the company’s human reviewers.

“We’ve also developed new detection models and techniques that can identify repeat offenders and abusive developer networks at scale,” Ahn continued. “This resulted in taking down of 100,000 bad developers in 2017, and made it more difficult for bad actors to create new accounts and attempt to publish yet another set of bad apps.”

Ahn noted that Google managed to reduce the number of “Potentially Harmful Applications,” such as trojans and fishing apps, by a factor of 10 over 2016, and he attributed the company’s success to the launch of Google Play Protect last year. Google also announced earlier today that it has partnered with threat detection company Appthority Inc. to add even more protections to Managed Google Play, an app platform for enterprises.

Even if Google’s detection methods may have improved in the last year, the company does not catch every bad app before it makes it to Google Play. In some cases, Google does not catch the apps at all, and it only removes them after being tipped off by third-party security companies.

For example, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. revealed earlier this month that it found pornographic adware in more than 60 game apps on Google Play, many of which were targeted toward children. Check Point also previously found at least 20 malicious flashlight apps that had already been downloaded by millions of Android users before Google removed them.

“Despite the new and enhanced detection capabilities that led to a record-high takedowns of bad apps and malicious developers, we know a few still manage to evade and trick our layers of defense,” Ahn said. “We take these extremely seriously, and will continue to innovate our capabilities to better detect and protect against abusive apps and the malicious actors behind them.”

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