Google Confirms New Play Store Update—App Deletion Now Just 5 Weeks Away | Laptop News

Google’s mission to make Android more like iPhone on the security and privacy front continues. Android 15 promises to use on-device AI to alert users to malicious app activity in real time. And while sideloading’s days aren’t over just yet, Google’s Play Store defenses have expanded to protect even that Wild West as best it can. And all this is just precursor to the biggest change of all: Google’s headline-grabbing mass deletion of low-quality Play Store apps starts August 31, five weeks from now.

The latest Play Store update is a welcome recognition of these security improvements, with Google confirming by way of its Chrome team that users with Play Store’s Play Protect enabled will no longer see “file might be harmful” warnings when using Chrome to download APKs from third-party stores. If Play Protect is not enabled, then users will still see the warnings in Chrome and a warning to enable Play Protect.

Forbes. Microsoft Windows Deadline-Update Your PC  By July 30. By Zak Doffman

As Android Authority reports, “[Chrome] will soon use the presence of Google Play Protect to decide whether to show the alert… While Play Protect initially only scanned new applications that were either uploaded to Google Play by developers themselves or by users when they first sideloaded them, it’s recently been upgraded to perform some app scans on-device in real-time and will soon do even deeper scans using on-device AI. Given these improvements to Play Protect, it’s no surprise that the Chrome team now sees the ‘file might be harmful’ warning as unnecessary.”

Google Play protect isn’t a catch-all, which is why there’s still such a high number of…