Google removed over 3,500 personal loan apps in India: report

Google in 2022 removed over 3,500 personal loan apps from the Playstore in India. According to the annual Play Protest report, these apps were in violation of the Play Policy requirements.

These apps act as facilitators on behalf of NBFCs and banks and Google Play last year introduced additional requirements to the developers of these apps. Google made it a requirement that they prominently disclose the names of all their partner NBFCs and banks in the app's description and provide a live URL to their respective websites. This is to ensure that the bank has listed the app as an official agent as part of the Personal Loan App Declaration.

This will show the authenticity of the app.

Google Play Protect is a security feature built into Android devices. It scans apps available on Google Play to detect malicious behaviour. It also alerts users about potentially harmful apps.

After the new policy was introduced, Google in 2022 banned 173K "bad accounts" and prevented fraudulent and abusive transactions of $2 billion. It also prevented 1.43 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play and prevented 500K submitted apps from accessing sensitive permissions.

Google said that these steps were taken due to new and improved security features and policy enhancements. The company has also strengthened its verification process and app developers now have to use email and phone among other verification methods to join the Play ecosystem. The Play Protect has stopped 500K apps from requesting access to personal data, contacts, location, camera, microphone, SMS, and call logs.

"We also launched the Google Play SDK Index to help developers evaluate an SDK’s reliability and safety and make informed decisions about whether an SDK is right for their business and their users," added the tech giant.