Google banned over 3,500 loan apps in India in 2022 for violating Play Store norms

Alphabet Inc-owned Google on Thursday said the company has banned more than 3,500 loan apps in the country in 2022 owing to the violation of Play Store policy norms.

In a blog post the company said, “In India, in 2022, we have reviewed and taken necessary enforcement action, including removal of apps, on more than 3,500 personal loan apps for violations of the Play policy requirements. We continue to uplevel our efforts in this area by regularly updating our policies and review processes.”

According to Google, with this, the company has also prevented 1.43 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play and banned 1,73,000 bad accounts, thus preventing more than $2 billion in fraudulent and abusive transactions in 2022.

Meanwhile, in order to make advertising user-friendly in 2023, the company has also announced rolling out the Beta version of its flagship Private Sandbox to a small percentage of Android devices. According to the company, Privacy Sandbox aims to limit covert tracking and collection of user data, including safer ways for apps to integrate with third-party developers.

"With the Beta, users and developers will be able to experience and evaluate these new solutions in the real world," the company said.

The development comes at the back of the legal tussle between the competition commission of India and Google over the company’s Play Store Policy. In October last year, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) imposed a fine on Google for unfair business practices in the Android ecosystem and Play Store. The CCI had slapped two penalties worth ₹1,337.76 crore and ₹936.44 crore, respectively, following an investigation, against the US-based tech giant for anti-competitive practices in its Play Store policies as well as the Android mobile ecosystem.

The CCI, in its investigation, accused the search engine behemoth of perpetuating and leveraging its dominant position in the online search and app store market, resulting in a denial of market access for competing search apps and protecting its position in online general search.

Following this, the search engine giant in January this year made major changes, including to the Android operating system and app store Play including options for default search engine by Indian users and licensing by original equipment manufacturers for pre-installation of apps. The tech giant said that implementation of these changes across the ecosystem will be a complex process and will require significant work at our end and, in many cases, significant efforts from partners, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and developers. “We're updating the Android compatibility requirements to introduce changes for partners to build non-compatible or forked variants,” the company had said.

Last month, the social media giant suffered a major setback after NCLAT rejected the company's plea against the CCI's penalty of ₹1,337 crore for anti-competitive activity. The NCLAT asked the tech giant to pay the amount of ₹1,337 crore in 30 days.