Google says Android malware installs fell by 50% in 2014

Last year saw a sharp decline in the global rate of Android malware installs, according to Google’sAndroid Security 2014 Year in Review report.

Adrian Ludwig, Lead Engineer for Android Security, highlighted a few of the key findings of the report in a blog post. He said that the overall worldwide rate of Potentially Harmful Application (PHA) installs decreased by nearly 50% in 2014, adding that less than 1% of Android devices had a PHA installed last year, and less than 0.15% of devices that only install from Google Play had a PHA installed.

“In 2014, the Android platform made numerous significant improvements in platform security technology, including enabling deployment of full disk encryption, expanding the use of hardware-protected cryptography, and improving the Android application sandbox with an SELinux-based Mandatory Access Control system (MAC),” the report said.

Ludwig also revealed that more than one billion Android devices in use worldwide are protected with Google Play which conducts 200 million security scans of devices per day. The report comes just a few days after Google announced that it had disabled 192 harmful Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users.