Google announced Thursday that it had removed almost 600 apps from its Play Store and advertising monetization programs. It said that they had violated their disruptive advertising policy and other rules.
600 Apps Removed From Google Play Store
Google said that it had developed new technology to help identify apps that push invasive and disruptive adverts. Per Bjorke, Senior Product Manager for Ad Traffic Quality, wrote in a blog:
Malicious developers continue to become more savvy in deploying and masking disruptive ads, but we’ve developed new technologies of our own to protect against this behavior. We recently developed an innovative machine-learning based approach to detect when apps show out-of-context ads, which led to the enforcement we’re announcing today.
Google sought to crack down on advertising that interferes with the normal working of your phone. Apple has similar guidelines. For example, its policy states that “apps, including any third-party advertisements displayed within them, may not run unrelated background processes, such as cryptocurrency mining.”