Your Android phone will soon warn you about sketchy apps changing icons

Google Play Protect is one of the first lines of defense against malicious apps on your Android phone. Google recently beefed up this service with real-time scanning protection, and the company has now announced more additions.

Google confirmed that Play Protect’s live threat detection feature can now detect when an app changes its icon, subsequently alerting users about this behavior.

Malicious app developers sometimes change their app icons to make it more difficult for users to remove them. So this will be another welcome layer of defense against sketchy apps.

Google says this new capability will be available in the coming months on the Pixel 6 series and newer and a “selection of new devices from other manufacturers.”

This isn’t the only addition, as Play Protect also brings enhanced on-device detection capabilities:

Google Play Protect now uses a new set of on-device rules to specifically look for text or binary patterns to quickly identify malware families. If an app shows these malicious patterns, we can alert you before you even install it.

The company adds that these on-device rules will be “frequently” updated to protect you from new and emerging types of malware. This feature may have been in the pipeline for a while, as we discovered a rules-based approach to on-device scanning almost a year ago.

In any event, Google says this enhanced approach to malware scanning is now available to all Android users with Google Play Services.