Google reveals that there are 200 million Android phones with malware installed

Google today released the Android security report of 2018, which shows an image of security in the operating system during the past year and which have been the main vectors of infection. In addition, it shows that it was detected that almost 200 million devices with their operating system were infected with malware.

Google continues to improve Android security figures

Google has recently completed 10 years, in which it has had many failures and security problems that Google has been correcting over the years. Each year, it publishes a report to see how security has progressed in the operating system, and this year, despite having improved, it continues to produce scary figures.

Thus, 0.04% of the total downloads of the Google Play were classified as Potentially Harmful Apps, or PHA, compared to the figure of 0.02% in 2017. This is at least double the number of dangerous apps, since more downloads were made in 2018 than in 2017. This change has a "trick", since Google has increased the type of apps and the categories that it considers to be dangerous.

What they have given are percentages, and that can give us an idea of ​​affected devices. The 0.08% of the devices that use the Play Store exclusively to download apps (they did not install APKs from other sources) were affected by this type of harmful apps. In the case of those who install apps from outside the Play Store, the figure was 0.68%; a decrease of 15% compared to 0.8% in the previous year.

The last number of Android devices we met was in January 2018, with 2,300 million active phones, compared to 2,000 million in May of the previous year. With this, the figure should be touching the 3,000 million, but we have preferred to use a more conservative figure of 2,500 million Android phones. With this, we have a total of 190 million users who have installed dangerous apps for their phones in 2018.