In brief
The fake navigation apps simply displayed ads and opened Google Maps; one charged users to remove ads. The January 2019 article reported that some had been removed while others remained available, and advised users to choose apps from well-known developers.
Malicious apps can be extremely difficult to guard against! Researchers recently discovered another 15 fraudulent apps on the Google Play Store, with more than 50 million downloads. These supposedly free navigation apps do nothing more than display ads and open Google Maps (Google Maps).
An ESET engineer recently posted on Twitter that he had discovered 15 fake navigation apps. Most copied icons from legitimate navigation apps to make themselves look like feature-rich navigation apps. In reality, they merely add a useless advertising layer between users and Google Maps, primarily to make money from embedded ads.
When users open these apps and tap functions such as driving, navigation, routes or “My Location,” the apps simply display ads or automatically open Google Maps. One app even asks users to “pay to remove ads.” Those who pay ultimately spend money just to use the already available free Google Maps app。
He also found that these fake apps occupied some of the top recommended positions in the Play Store’s Maps & Navigation category, while legitimate, genuinely feature-rich navigation apps such as Sygic, TomTom and Waze were not recommended by the Play Store.
He has reported these issues to Google. At the time of writing, some of the problematic apps had been removed, but others remained available. Google has introduced artificial intelligence and machine-learning bots in the Play Store to weed out these problematic apps. However, the Play Store contains more than two million apps, so some inevitably slip through. Users should maintain a healthy skepticism about the apps they download. The best approach is to choose apps from well-known developers whenever possible.
Original article URL: https://bit.ly/2HcoViL