Google Play announced major upgrades to Play Protect’s live threat detection on Android phones and tablets, intended to better detect apps changing their appearance to hide their activity. They were already working on the Pixel 6, but now Google is rolling them out to more devices.
Earlier versions of Play Protect already scanned apps in real time, checking for known harmful software and using on-device machine learning to find suspicious activity. However, Google claims that this update is better at detecting deceptive app behavior. Malicious developers often try to hide harmful apps by changing icons or disguising their true purpose, and that shouldn’t work anymore.
Play Protect’s live threat detection now actively finds and warns users about these tricks, making identifying and removing dangerous apps easier. This feature first launched onPixel 6and newer devices, but it is being expanded to more phones.
TheNovember 2024 updateoriginally brought AI-powered Scam Detection to Phone by Google and Google Messages. This system, which runs on-device AI, actively looks for suspicious call and message patterns linked to scams and warns users right away. The new update adds even stronger scam detection directly to Play Protect, which should help it find and stop malicious behavior from fake apps.
This upgrade lets the app take a more detailed look at an app’s code, leading to faster and more precise detection of new or changing malware, which tends to alter itself to avoid being caught. This real-time check gives users instant warnings about an app’s safety before they install it, which greatly reduces the chance of accidentally downloading harmful software.
This all started back inOctober 2023, when Google originally made these features much stronger by adding real-time scanning at the code level for apps that had never been seen before. The new update is going to take what’s there and improve Android’s overall security system.
Google says Google Play Protect is a key part of Android’s multi-layered defense. It is meant to work alongside features like app permission controls, Safe Browsing, and security updates to verify you don’t accidentally download or sideload any malicious apps or files.
This is because even if one security layer fails, others still protect your data. The addition of stronger factory reset protections and improved one-time password security in Android 16 is a big part of that. I’ve had to deal with Google’s OTP recently, and can say it really needs an upgrade. I still need a one-time password through text because none of the other options work for my account.
This is all done through Google’s AI model. While there are probably a lot of people who don’t like that idea, it’s being done locally, not by sending data to Google, so there shouldn’t be any privacy issues.
