68,740 or 1 in 10 Apps in the Google Play Store are Malware

Source: Daily Mobile - March 10th, 2013 

There was some research done by Trend Micro that looked at two million apps for available for Android devices and found out that "450,000 - or 23% - were found to be outright malicious or high risk." This includes apps that are not available in the Google Play store itself. If you are going with only the apps that you can only get from Google's Play store the number drops to 68,740 or about 1 in 10 apps are malware.

Google has taken steps to counter this problem Android 4.2 (Jellybean) is much more secure than previous versions.That being said the problem here is it will be a while before the mass have it on their devices. (Most are still running Android 2.3) Other hurdles for Google is that Android is open source (that's good thing) and it's hardcore users expect it to be. These users know the risks from malware and take the precaution with their devices however the general public does not. This means that it is a real issue with Android but Google can not make the OS a walled garden to protect it's users with out alienating them.

What's Google to do than? My thought is to have stricter controls on what goes into the Play Store. The Play Store is Google's official app store and a user should not have to doubt if what they are downloading there will ruin their device or not. I understand if a few apps slip by here and there that are malicious however, 1 in 10 is WAY to high.

Don't get me wrong here people, my goal of this post is not to bash Android at all. It's fine operating system that takes up the Symbian mantle and runs with it. (for that I am grateful) My point here is that the malware threat on Android is real and people need to take it seriously to protect the phone they love.