Google has to sweep through its Play Store to remove apps that violate its guidelines. In recent months, the punitive measures for Android applications have involved so-called stalking apps contaminated with adware. Google has now taken action against around 600 apps that are said to have violated the Play Store’s advertising guidelines with regard to annoying advertisements.
Google Takes Action Against Annoying Advertisements
According to Express, the applications are not only thrown out of the Play Store, but are also no longer allowed to participate in Google’s monetization platforms as the company lets out in a blog entry. The so-called disruptive ads, according to Google have the potential to harm users, advertisers and publishers. According to Google, annoying ads are those that are displayed to users in an unexpected way and that impair the functionality of the smartphone. One form of advertising that the company is currently experiencing strong growth is the advertisements referred to by Google as out-of-context ads. These are played out on the smartphones even when the associated app is not active at all.
Innovative Approach That Helped Google To Ban The Applications
In a blog post on the subject, Google announced that it has developed new technologies to protect Android users from applications that offer annoying ads. More recently, the company has implemented an innovative machine learning approach to identify applications that serve ads outside the context. This new approach helped the company find the 600 applications that were banned in the last wave.
Google criticizes this as an invasive maneuver, which would partially disrupt device functions. In addition, such advertising which extends across the entire smartphone screen, can lead to unintended ad clicks. The search engine giant claims to use artificial intelligence to better discover such out-of-context ads. The results of this AI analysis have led to the current Play Store discards, Google said. In total, the apps are said to have been downloaded and installed billion times. The applications were therefore primarily apps for English-speaking users, which came from developers in China and India. Google did not disclose the names of the apps or developer companies.
