Tech giant Google has cracked the whip on hundreds of apps over annoying advertisements. The company said it has removed as many as 600 apps from the Play Store. According to the company, these apps were violating Google’s disruptive ads policy. Besides, they also disallowed the company’s interstitial policy. Disruptive ads are those that appear in unexpected ways and thus interfere with usability. Google said parts of these ads are always out-of-context. These ads were even bombarded with a full-screen display while making phone calls or unlocking the handset. The full-screen ads are designed to increase the clicks. In return, the clicks generate a huge sum for developers from the ad agencies.
The company has also banned these apps from ad monetization platforms Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager. Google said there numbers of malicious developers who add annoying advertisements on a device just to generate clicks. The ads are served mostly when a device is not in use. These ads generally appear when a user unlocks his mobile. Google’s latest move is a part of its ongoing exercise to keep the Play Store clean. The company noted the growing challenges in enforcing its rules to keep the platform secure because of savvy developers. It, however, promised to continue blocking threats on its platform and remove malicious apps that put users at risk of being exposed to frauds.
Google said it has now become more stringent in checking ad-fraud on its platform. The company said it has developed a new machine learning technology to enforce its rules. The technology will help the company detect apps showing out-of-context or annoying ads to users. Google said it will continue investing in new technology to prevent its platform from becoming vulnerable to misuse and attacks. Reports suggest that most of the now removed apps were from India, China, and Singapore and directed at targeting English speaking users. These apps were installed over 4.5 billion times. Google claims that there are roughly three-million apps on the Play Store.
