Will Google’s ‘Bouncer’ Make the Android Market Any Safer?
Yesterday Google announced a significant-sounding effort to secure the Android Market, Google Bouncer. Bouncer scans existing and future apps in the Android Market for malware. In the past Google has been criticized for its low barrier of entry into the Market, choosing to retroactively pull malicious apps that have been reported by vendors.
But will Bouncer make Android Market any safer? Is it even anything new?
Lookout Mobile directed me to a strange line in Google’s blog post: “The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now,” wrote Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP of Engineering, Android. “Between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40 percent decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market.”
We’ll probably never know how much malware Google has actually blocked from the Android Market, but vendors have discovered a tiny actual number: BitDefender chief threat researcher Catalin Cosoi told me only 0.5 percent of the 10,000 malicious Android apps (from 135 malware families) in 2011 came from the Android Market. The rest come from third party app markets, mostly in China and Russia, where protection is so lax it makes the Android Market look like a maximum-security prison.