Malware growth had been inclining in the Android Market. But the search engine giant, Google has been policing its online store for quite a few months now. Finally, they have come up with the new sheriff in town, naming him Bouncer. Bouncer is a security service Google put in place to scan new apps as developers load them onto Android Market.
Google said that Bouncer will potentially sweep apps for malicious behavior. Along with it, it will even analyze the new developer accounts to prevent “repeat-offenders” from distributing their wares.
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Hiroshi Lockheimer, a vice president of engineering at Google’s Android unit, dedicated a blog post on Thursday, wherein he wrote, “While it’s not possible to prevent bad people from building malware, the most important measurement is whether those bad applications are being installed from Android Market – and we know the rate is declining significantly.”
As soon as Bouncer was implemented, Google noticed that the number of “potentially malicious downloads” from Android Market saw a 40 percent drop. According to Lockheimer, this was at the time of the proliferation of malware, which was beginning to become a problem. 
With Bouncer, Google will be moving to a new direction. Till now, Google has trumpeted its laissez-faire approach, while managing the apps market. Bouncer will help the Android sales further and even the apps will be tested at a very early stage. Google’s Android Market is unlike Apple Inc, which famously subjects apps to a rigorous evaluation process before they can be downloaded.
However, the freedom of the Android market, along with the developers’ preference for its openness, has been helpful in boosting the platform’s swift growth and sharpen its competition with Apple’s iOS mobile platform.
Lookout’s cofounder, Kevin Mahaffey, was all praise for Google’s moves as he said, “It is great that Google is working with the Android community to provide an alternative to a manual curation process, allowing developers to innovate quickly while also increasing the baseline level of security for Android users.”
Lookout is a security research firm, which published a report in December estimating that more than $1 million had been stolen from Android users in 2011. This resulted in a number of malicious software downloads, while showing concern that this figure could rise dramatically in the near future.
Charlie Miller, a security consultant with Accuvant said, “The reason that Android is kind of cool is you can do anything you want and there’s no overlord.” He added, “But Google is doing the smart thing. Malware was getting to be a bit of a problem and it’s better to take care of it now instead of letting get out of control.”
Miller made news last year, when he smuggled malware onto Apple’s App Store to demonstrate its vulnerability.