Online security firm Marble Labs are published a report that indicates more than 40% of “dangerous” apps on Apple and Google’s app stores were made by American developers.Marble Labs found that 42.14 percent of “dangerous” apps come from American developers, followed by China with 17.69 percent, and India with 9.53 percent. Just 1.19 percent originated from the UK.
“While China, Korea, India and Taiwan generate a great number of malicious and risky mobile apps, their combined total doesn’t amount to that of the United States,”
The US may be responsible for the largest number of worrying apps according to the research, but that’s partly because of the high number of apps being developed in that country.
Marble Labs published a second table, ranking the “likelihood that an app from these countries is malicious or highly risky,” which provided a different insight based on the percentage of ‘risky’ mobile apps, rather than just the raw numbers.
Here the figures were different with China topping the table, followed by Taiwan (seven percent) and Singapore (four percent). The USA, at this point, dropped to just over one percent, emphasizing exactly how much app development goes on in the country.
Applications with intrusive functions can often escape quality control checks by app stores, Marble said. Apple maintains tight control over its App Store to keep the quality of applications high, while Google also checks applications in Play for malicious behavior. But it’s not perfect.
It’s important to think about the different grades of danger, too. Uploading someone’s contacts to a server without telling them is a serious privacy intrusion, but in many cases it’s due to a developer not understanding privacy laws in their country, rather than full-blown cybercrime.
The report said it may be true that Chinese or Russian app developers are responsible for developing most of the malicious applications for tampered devices.
