From time to time reports are published that are nothing short of worrying relating to dangerous applications found in the Google Play Store and in the App Store and this is what has happened in the past few hours with the data disclosed by Pixalate.
Over 800,000 applications have been removed from the two main mobile stores during the first six months of 2021 and this figure is the result of an analysis that involved over 5 billion apps published on the two platforms of Google and Apple.
In particular, in the first half of 2021, 813,000 applications considered dangerous as they violated the privacy of users were identified and this amount of apps represents about 15% of the total applications published in the two main mobile stores.
The fake apps have been deleted from the stores to avoid further damage but the data confirm that they are very popular applications, capable of recording 9.3 billion downloads on the Google Play Store and over 21 million reviews on the App Store.
According to what emerges, 86% of those apps published on the Google Play Store and 98% of those in the App Store violated the rules relating to COPPA accounts (the rules to protect users under the age of 13).
And again, 66% of deleted Android applications required at least a dangerous permission, 27% of apps were able to access the GPS module while 19% of applications could access the camera and stored data.
Finally, according to what emerges from the data published by Pixelate, 28% of Russian apps for Android did not respect the rules for privacy while 60% of the applications removed by Apple from its store were from Chinese developers and did not respect the rules on privacy.
Basically, despite the great efforts of Google and Apple, the situation of the two main mobile stores is still quite worrying when it comes to security.
