The official Google Play Store has been identified as the primary source of malware installs on Android devices in a recent academic study — considered the largest one of its kind carried out to date.
Using telemetry data provided by NortonLifeLock (formerly Symantec), researchers analyzed the origin of app installations on more than 12 million Android devices for a four-month period between June and September 2019.
In total, researchers looked at more than 34 million APK (Android application) installs for 7.9 million unique apps.
